The Revolution So Far

I’ve always struggled with the elastic dimensions of future time.

You know – the way Next Tuesday, say, can attain such mythical status in your mind that it becomes a cauldron, a vat, a veritable corrie lake of possibility, just waiting for the giant sponge of your swingeing creative efficiency to come galumphing over the horizon and suck out every last drop?

Maybe that’s just me.

Anyway. We have decamped to California this month, and somehow through the whirl of preparation and schedule malfunctions and flights and jetlag (ugh) and child-wrangling, I managed to maintain, in the teeth of blatant reality, the utterly loopy belief that at any moment I would stumble upon the tiny – but elastic! – slice of future time that I needed to update this blog.

Then I turned around today and realised that not only has it been totally a fortnight since I posted here, but I also totally missed my first anniversary last Friday. OH WELL.

Yes, it’s been a full year (and a week) since I first cleared my throat in these parts.

Missing the date itself was kind of appropriate, in a way. In keeping, I might say, with the conditions under which String Revolution was born.

It was a little unhinged of me to start a new venture of this kind when I did. We had an insomniac one-year-old. We’d just ripped out the back of our house. I was trying to finish a novel. Among other things.

But craft blog was what the spindly, wet-eyed, improbable little entities who run my creative department were chittering, and once the fever took hold, nothing would do me but to get on with it, chaos and filth and sleep deprivation be damned.

It was a bit like the pansies above, blooming irrepressibly against the unlovely background of our unfinished block wall.

And besides, all the actual crafting and blogging were to take place in that deliciously pliable future time, right, into which any amount of productive activity can be so recklessly stuffed.

In the circumstances, actually, I’m pretty proud of what I did.

I still don’t really know where I’m headed with this project. I have nearly as many post ideas as I have posts published, and one thing I battle with is the frustration of never feeling that there’s enough time. The calm, orderly, efficient future just doesn’t seem to arrive.

(Yeah, hello, newsflash, I have two young kids. Perhaps it’ll get easier when they can both read.)

I’m also working on having things to sell, and concomitantly, not throwing up when I contemplate trying to sell them.

I have, in fact, made great strides along that latter axis in the past year – thanks to many wonderful people who live in my computer. (I may trumpet their anti-emetic qualities in more detail some other time.)

And since I’m onto the gratitude part, huge enormous thanks to you, my peerless Revolutionary Horde, without whom – really – none of this would be worth anything much. I hope you know how much I appreciate your taking the time to read String Revolution. Thank you for hanging in there when I get verbose or tangential, and thank you for coming back again when I’ve been silent.

It’s been an interesting year – a year in which I’ve really only begun to find my feet in this somewhat peculiar role of craft blogger (there – I said it).

I have a feeling – and a hope, and perhaps just the merest hint of a plan – that this blog and I are preparing to move into a new phase.

Please join me for the next thrilling installment, whatever shape it may take.