REFLECTION AND REINVENTION: WHERE I'VE BEEN AND WHERE I'M GOING NEXT. | Jazz Blackwell
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| Picture credit: my pal Eilidh, at the old Fruitmarket in Glasgow. |
Dear reader, hello.
If you've been a follower of this blog in any capacity, it'll be no new occurrence to you that I haven't posted anything to this blog in a number of months. For that, I generally offer a half-hearted, wishy-washy apology with a smart-Alec comment or some pseudo-witty commentary about my life between posts. This will not serve the same purpose but, rather, will act as a legitimate explanation.
I initially began this site as a book blog in the autumn of 2015. I thought it was a perfect idea; I love reading, and I'm very much someone who likes to share my opinions with like-minded people (or just scream into the metaphorical void by throwing my ideas out into the virtual abyss that is the world wide web). That said, I quickly lost my passion for book blogging. Simply put, I've never been someone who is okay with the idea that I have to do something; teachers throughout my entire educational career will attest to the fact that I've always been heinously bad at meeting homework deadlines or doing assigned reading. Reading ceased to be so much the fun hobby I've always loved it for and became something of a necessity; I felt I had to be reading X number of books per week in order to post about them, or I had to finish a book within a certain time frame in order to publish a review on it.
It also quickly became apparent to me that there's a certain type of person involved in book blogging. That is to say, the type of person who has shelves full of pristine, shiny hardbacks, who reads every new-release novel as soon as they come out and, pertinently, someone who enjoys Young Adult fiction. In short: the type of person I am not. It became apparent to me rather quickly that there is little space in the blogosphere for a bookcase of well-thumbed, dog-eared, broken-spine crime/thriller paperbacks from the 1980s. Not to sound like a piece of shit hipster or anything, but for my twenty-one years, I'm an old soul at heart and book blogging is a young man's game.
To cut all of that waffling short, I became altogether rather disenchanted with the notion of blogging about books. This was never something that I got into for money or for attention, but I did expect some networking opportunities to come out of it. I did, as some of you may recall, also attempt to blog about my life. However that, too, fell rather flat.
As you may know, I'm about to conclude my second year of university, marking the halfway point through my higher education experience. I was never really one to buy into the trite cliché of going to university to find yourself and other such metaphysical sounding bullshit that we like to tell ourselves but I'm afraid I'm going to have reinforce it a little bit right now. These past two years have left me with more valuable life experience than I ever expected to get from uni, and have genuinely helped me to solidify the direction that I want to go in life - including the direction in which I want to take this blog. I plan to take it in an altogether more 'lifestyle' route; not necessarily with any distinct set theme that will limit what I can and can't post about and constrain me to time limits in the way I felt I was before. Here you'll see everything from uni tips, to recipes, to film and book and music reviews. I give you my word that I'll become more dedicated.
If you read all of this, thank you.
Keep it weird,
Jazz xo
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