And now, the end is near. And so I face the final curtain…

Well – that’s even more portentous than my most purple entries in this series.  But indulge me.

It’s a month since I started doing these, and so looking back on the purple, the blue etc, is okay.

I’ve learned a bit, and I should celebrate (sic) that, bar for a couple of days where for whatever reasons (mostly idleness, truth be told) I didn’t do an entry, I mostly did a double the following day. Go me!

Below is a semi-structured set of impressions/reflections/whatever. Not much actual content on living in the end times, but I think I may have said everything that’s in my head/heart for now. Didn’t take long…

I don’t know what I will do next (if anything) around regular blogging, but I’m open to suggestions… 

What I said I was going to do

a) I need to get back into the habit of regular brain vomits 

b) I want to be able to capture for ‘posterity’ (and hopefully hilarity) what it felt like to be watching the oceans spew out heat, watching the ‘natural’ disasters unfolding, and to see that – outside of Climate Twitter – there was just a deathly hush in the mass media and

c) to spark conversation with like-ish-minded people about what they are feeling and thinking.

1. And b) were in my gift, and I got them done, ish.  c) would have required much better publicity/publicising/more time on Twitter, that dying website, than I was willing/able to manage (but thank you to the people who DID comment – much appreciated).

What bits I did

The blogging, and sorta on “the feels” of it all. It wasn’t so much about the facts of the after (Antarctica, marine heatwaves, 2m temperatures) as that dread…

What bits I didn’t (and why)

“I’ll try to explore some of the reasons why we are where we are, without getting toooooo bogged down in the technical, in the academic (in the worst sense).  I’ll throw in a little light Gramsci (passive revolution, hegemony), some of the eco-feminist stuff I’ve liked, and whatever comes to hand, via comments, tweets (if any)…. I want to write about disavowal, lacunae, aporias.”

I didn’t write that much about some of this stuff- esp. The eco-feminist. EIther my unacknowledged patriarchal mind-set or general half/quarter assedness. I didn’t have the goals “in front of” me enough, so drifted, responded to daily events and doomscrolling, perhaps?

What went well

Just bashing out the words.  Keeping the table in the leaping off page updated

What went badly

Lack of a visual hook (even just a crappy calendar with circled dates would have been good).  Lack of standard end-text for each post (e.g. just a template). Lack of twitter threads etc. Lack of internal links/call backs.  Lack of Twitter threads etc (though I had this suggested, I only did it once or twice.  Why? Lazy? Couldn’t be bothered? Seemed narcissistic (!!?). Blah.

Didn’t develop the “reading list” thing well enough. S

What I learned

I learned plenty, some it just around the craft of doing this stuff – how do you eat an elephant? One bit at a time. The most “successful” ones (e.g. quick to do, focussed) were when I had three sub-headings about different things I wanted to discuss. That meant 3 lots of 350 words. On a couple of them I even used the Google Voice transcription thing, and learned (the hard way) that you have to keep your eye on the screen to make sure Big Brother is still listening.

It is harder than you think to end up with decent text.

Having a folder on my gdrive and then cutting and pasting into wordpress worked well I am slowly developing the organisational habits I should have mastered when I was 14 or 15 – go me!

What I’d do differently

Sub-divide posts.

Make sure there were ‘call-backs’ to earlier posts.

Make sure I actually grasped the various fistfuls of nettles that I said I was going to.

So, will stop this regular thing now, and may, for the month of August or September do something similar, making sure that I do better on some of the things I didn’t really get a grip on with this.  

Did anyone have a favourite post, btw?  What do you think?