The Urge to Purge

I’m full of Kali energy at the moment, Kali being the triple Hindu Goddess most commonly associated with death and destruction. The Goddess who clears out the old to make way for the new.

There is a ruthless edge to my thinking … a desire to purge what is no longer working and to reorganise everything to make the writing side of my life easier.

I have decided I want to rethink the way I write, where I write, how my writing is presented, why and what I want to write and share.

The winds of change are stirring.

I’ve had a hold on creating a professional website because, well if I am honest, there just aren’t enough hours in the day to dedicate to creating a new website and keep pace with all my other writing and family commitment (oh and I haven’t had the need to procrastinate from a big project for a while!)

Part of me was hoping there was an easier way to organise my writing and online presence than to create yet another website. The other part wondered what the actual point of creating one was – what would I put on it, other than gathering all my bits and pieces in the one place? Wasn’t there any easier way?

The crunch came after months of being unhappy with the look of my second blog Shine A Little Light. I created Shine A Little Light late last year, in another of my turn of tide moments, to celebrate a year of blogging (what else do you do? Perhaps I should have just made a cake and blown out a candle?) This blog is meant to be a note book of my experiences of motherhood. Creating it separated my personal life as a Mum and a woman, from my professional life as a writer. It was done in an effort to write more but in actual fact I think it has meant I write less. At the moment Shine A Little Light is a weird conglomeration of lots of unrelated things strung together loosely, under the banner of ‘motherhood’.

Both my personal and writing blogs are hosted on Blogger. I want to remain loyal to Blogger – after all it is where I cut my blogging teeth, but I’ve become annoyed and frustrated with some of the limitations of Blogger. I do love the simplicity of use and the ability to tweak and change the template (both points of contention I have with WordPress) but I long for some more flexibility.

I’m thinking of going over to the dark side – to WordPress, at least with Shine A Little Light. Once I’ve done my personal blog, which gets almost no traffic and thus won’t suffer from being uprooted, I’ll consider if I’m up to the task of sorting through my writing blog and shifting location.

The downside of shifting my writing blog is obvious – none of my search engine links will work – which leads to a moment of terror … how will anyone find me or the handful of articles which regularly get hits? What sort of extra effort am I going to have to put in to re-establish all the new links? The upside, as I see it, is a way of better organising my writing – as I write both fiction and non fiction on numerous sites. I long for a new look and more flexibility. And there is no shortage of social book marking sites to utilise to drive traffic towards the most popular of articles if they had new addresses.

This urge to purge coincides with the dark moon period, which doesn’t surprise me. So I feel up to the task of reviewing, rethinking and reinventing for a new era. I’ll keep you posted!

Have you taken the leap from one blog provider to another and what were your experiences? Is there any part of your writing life that could do with the Kali blow torch to clear the way the old and make way for the new?

Image Compliments of Mircea Ways to Say Good Bye

Jodi Cleghorn is singing the Beatles Hello, Good-bye in her head to distract from the disturbing feeling created by the incessant need to organise her life, from writing to the manner in which the family photos are displayed on the mantle? You can read more of Jodi’s fiction at Writing With Passionate Abandon.