After many years of weekly posts every Monday during term-time at 6am, I have decided to ease up the pressure on myself to write something new each week just for the sake of it and, as of March 2024, will no longer be posting a new essay to PU every Monday morning.
There I was - a Sunday afternoon, void of ideas again, scratching my head in order to produce something, anything, for you readers to enjoy, when I realised a far better alternative might be to take Wittgenstein’s advice and simply not write anything at all: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.
Clues have abounded in recent titles - Burn It Down, Reaching Rock Bottom, Inferring the End… While writing to a deadline can be, and has been, energising and fun, I feel it can also eventually lead to a scraping of the bottom of the barrel of ideas just so that something is there to publish each week. Although I have endeavoured to maintain the quality of each post, I am finding myself publishing on here these days because I have set the deadline, rather than publishing because I have something that I really want to say.
I still intend to post on here regularly - just no longer every week. Sometimes it might be several times a week if inspiration strikes, other times I might be silent for months. Who knows? But after five years and 180 posts, with very few submissions from other writers to help ease the burden, I realise that my own sanity and happiness each weekend is worth more to me now than meeting a self-imposed deadline that I’m not convinced anyone even cares about but me.
