Three Years of Mostly About Stories – A Retrospective

Mostly About Stories is three years old, ish. I am a little proud of the number because I am good at giving up on things and I have not given up on this. I would be lying if I said writing a blog post had become a sort of habit to me. There have been weeks and weeks where I have done nothing, depleting old stores of posts. And there have been times when I have written many posts in one go, just because there was plenty to say. Until recently I had managed to post pretty much every week – it was a kind of unwritten rule with me that I would get one weekend off a month. And regardless of the machinery behind achieving that regularity, I am still chuffed about it.

Most good things come to an end, and I have to admit to myself that I need to change my approach to the blog to keep it running. That most terrible ghoul – one’s personal life – is beginning to get in the way.

This past year I finished my degree at Cambridge and after a few months dilly-dallying about in France and Switzerland and the US and Jordan, I finally got a job. Readers, I hope, will forgive me for the last part, because to the best of my knowledge there are not altogether many options for receiving money in regular and sizeable amounts other than these so-called “jobs”. Even murdering one’s relatives, a tried and tested method, is hampered by their ultimately limited numbers. And though I am not a gambler I am not interested in becoming one either.

Earlier this month I moved to Moscow to take up a job focusing on renewable energy and decarbonisation strategies in a Russian energy company. To a large extent, I am continuing my Cambridge degree by other means. The same cycle of reading, thinking, and reporting exists in both spaces. The only difference is that I now use PowerPoint instead of Word and my exams are all viva voce. My interest in making the planet a better place for all of us is a little less than my interest in great works of literature, but not insignificant either. Anyway, I believe that it would be a dereliction of my duty to others not to work in a way that has an impact on the world.

It is too soon to tell whether I will survive the job or explode like Thomas Buddenbrook. Either way, I have noticed already that I have considerably less time to read and write than I had previously, and this is a problem for the blog. One solution I considered long ago was simply to write about shorter things. In particular, given the blog’s name, I could simply write about short stories every time. This is a possibility. The shorter the work, the easier it is to dissect it, and probably the more interesting the blog post would ultimately be.

Another option is to do more generally thematic pieces, more considerations of a topic than anything else. The problem is that I am twenty-four years old and cripplingly aware that anything interesting on a topic has already been written and so I would rather not waste my readers’ time. Is there really much value in me selecting some obelisk-like word and riffing on it for a few pages? Montaigne could title an essay “on such-and-such” but can I? At school each weekend one had to write such essays – perhaps it’s a habit I should get back into. And, well, in truth much of what I write on this blog has been partly for myself and writing such essays would be good practice for me, after all.

Either way or indeed any of the other ways – more translations, more interludes into my own experiences (I liked the grape picking piece too) – I am not such a huge fan of the regular half-analytical half-descriptive half-homework-helpers half-entertainers that I have been putting out for these past three years, not anymore that is. I don’t want things to become routine and stale. But the terrible truth is that I have begun to notice repetitions in my own work. I don’t just mean the regular references to Conrad, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and so on. I am allowed to have favourites. What I mean is, I seem to be saying the same thing over and over again. Certain observations on the meaning of life and the difficulty of communication, for example, just keep coming up. And as the job and I do battle, I am only going to get more tired and more boring.

I do not like the academic criticism I have read, which is mostly soulless and dead. But there is something to be said for the highbrow prose that lives just on the edges of the academy, in fancy magazines I rarely read. Serious essays, things that require research not to make a point at a conference but as a dish requires spices – to make them a joy to consume. I read a book and maybe the introduction and write a post. This is a function of the time constraints I live in. But it forces me to rely on things inside myself, rather than stretching myself in new directions. Another option for me would be to write much less regularly, even monthly, but each time produce a properly researched piece that actually had something interesting to say.

The truth is, my first month in Moscow has been frightening. Not because of war fears and the pleasures of being treated as a migrant, though the former at least has made me lose sleep. No, what is frightening is that although I am only supposed to work from nine till six each day (and my colleagues log on half an hour later than that anyway), suddenly I find myself almost unable to read. Exhaustion, disorganisation, one can lay the blame on whatever one wants. But the situation is the same. I pick up books and put them down. The pleasure and the attention have gone. No doubt the onrush of routine and stability – because I still haven’t had a normal week yet – will help. And indeed, this past week has seen me read a little.

But from my perspective, I need Mostly About Stories to encourage my growth and development, rather than hinder them. I need it to be a place where I can follow my interests rather than one where I just repeatedly rip the surface contents of a book out in order to say the same things I’ve been saying for three years over and over again. It should not be an echo chamber for my own unchanging self. We all agree that serious literature is good because it rewards thought. My blog posts, generally written the two days after finishing a book, rarely manage to highlight that depth as well as I would like. And writing the posts often doesn’t make me think as much as I would like either.

What form the future of the blog will take I do not know. It will still mostly be about stories. But the posts will be less regular, less predictable in content and timings (though still on Mondays/Sunday evenings). The most important thing is that I would like to write about things that interest me. I would like the motivation for a piece to be not finishing a book but the thoughts that the book has occasioned within me. Three years is a long time, and I’m proud we have made it thus far. But as I am unable to complete a merger or acquisition, and refuse to outsource (though I am extremely grateful to my girlfriend, Marcelina, for helping me with proofreading and so much more) a change of pace will have to do to keep my content from getting stale. I hope you approve.

But do have your say and leave a comment on what you would like to see in posts and approach going forward. I have been really grateful for the additional engagement in my posts this year. This past year I have even had various book recommendations come my way (e.g. Anton Reiser, Riders in the Chariot), which I do note down but cannot promise in the near future to fulfil. Anyway, thank you, readers!

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The numbers, for those who like them. In 2019, I had 4635 views, in 2020 I had 17960, in 2021 I had 35570. The most popular pieces continue to be those that are most useful for students – things on Benjamin, Kafka, Gogol, etc. But I am always glad to see more niche things get even a single view.

The books I enjoyed the most last year were Robinson’s Home and Sebald’s The Emigrants.