This blog was supposed to be a remedy, a palliative treatment to cure a break in my soul – my European soul. In 2016, I had to find something to do to combat the irrefutable madness of the Brexit vote. I felt like an Emile Zola who nobody knew, crying out to the world from the slippery slope of my rooftop two simple words: I accuse.
Beginnings were full of promise: the literary medicine I was swallowing on a daily basis was having an immediate effect on my fragile equilibrium. I joined countless Facebook groups, whose members were fighting a common battle against the British island mentality. I was feeling much better, much stronger, helped by the fact that my professional qualification would remain intact, that my freedom of movement would be guaranteed courtesy of a French passport.
Then, it started to go wrong. I realised who were the people clogging up the Facebook alleyways. I was aware of illiterate psychos ready to pounce on every word I wrote but they didn’t read. A prime example was my little piece on the Netflix series Emily in Paris: I criticized the acting but admired the use of a French expression full of history and meaning, that went unnoticed by the Facebook readers. It wasn’t because they missed it in the episode I was referring to, but because they hadn’t read my post to the end.
I kept on writing, though; I kept on posting on Facebook, until I got scolded more and more from group owners who accused me of promoting my blog. They were partially right, of course. But it was done with the best of intentions: trying to replace headline making memes and newspaper headlines with something personal and authentic. I would have loved to read other people’s blogs. It wouldn’t be so bad it the guy who posts a link from the Guardian actually read the article he wants us to think he read.
It was the writing that spurred me on. How can an irrational event like Brexit make me discover the joys of writing? Well, I don’t know. And although my last post here dates from October, I haven’t stopped writing. More than 70,000 words to make up a story that may not be very good but is authentic: it’s the story about a man trapped in his past, a woman looking for her future, and a goddess of time who loses both past and future to protect the present.
They say most blogs die of natural causes: the author’s apathy and the reader’s lack of interest. They also say that you must spend so much more time advertising your blog than you do writing it. As for books, most aspiring authors never finish a work in progress.
But I’ve decided that this particular blog won’t die. It may be suffering from loneliness, but I’m not going to let it die as long as the statistics don’t stay motionless.
As for my attempt at writing a novel, I’ve started so I’ll finish. It’s called The Crystal Lake. Funny, my obsession with crystals.