Writing vs blogging
My last blogpost dates from a year ago. I could pretend I don’t know where the time went, but I do know. It went to reading books (I hit my 150 books in a year goal for 2019), it went to posting on my Instagram (@suusreadsbooks) and it went to (still) recovering from massive overexhaustion. And sometimes, when I could find the energy to produce or be creative, it went to writing short stories.
In 2017 I started at ‘The Writer’s Guide‘ a center for the written word in Rotterdam run by the amazing and lovely Silvana Sodde (actual hero of mine by now). She has let me explore my writing abilities and urged me to read more Dutch so I could work on my Dutch vocabulary. Writing as a ‘writing ninja’ has given me a lot of joy and even led to me having one of my short stories published on ‘Vers Beton’. I have also been sending stories in for competitions and got long-listed for the ‘debutantenschrijfwedstrijd’ (writing competition for debutants) by Stichting Beter Schrijven.
I really like writing. It is probably why I started this blog in the first place. But I find it difficult to balance writing and blogging. It’s probably why I haven’t been on here for so long. But I want to get back in, I don’t want to just write or just blog, I want both. Sometimes I lie awake at night composing whole blogposts on why I think 19th-century British literature resonates with me so well or compiling a list of books I want to review in longer formats then fit on Instagram. But I never do.
So I updated my picture on this website and I’m writing this long waffle of a post to see if it helps me get back to blogging. I hope you’ll like it. And otherwise, I will link my short stories, so you can read those instead (although they are in Dutch, maybe google translate or DeepL can work a miracle).
‘Stadsverhaal: De Slag om Amsterdam’, published 23th July 2019 on Vers Beton
Other life update: we got a dog and she is THE CUTEST. Her name is Laika, expect lots of pictures.
