As avid readers of this blog will tell you, I occasionally write more than blathering blog posts.

I started this MidnightMurphy venture shortly after I arrived in Dublin.  During the months before I moved here, I was engaged in a readjustment phase to Ireland, from my childhood home in Limerick. I was also detoxifying after decades in Amsterdam. To help me deal with these major life decisions I started writing.

I had long dreamed of being a proper writer who could finish a story – perhaps one day even a book. The ideas were bounteous. But the will and the dedication were absent. This was partly (or more likely predominantly) due the constant herbal fug in which my mind existed while in Amsterdam.

Hazy, lazy days. The realms which my mind conquered were vast. Mentally I had the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolved. The only problem was that I never wrote any of this stuff down. When I would wake up the next day, I could vaguely remember but not quite grasp the brilliant solution that materialised when I was under the influence of the Herb.

Returning to Ireland was a major life change. To which I was mentally alert as I was clear headed. It was gruesomely, traumatic in many ways. Imagine my horror at being fully awake all the time as I took the new world in.

I started writing to process this.

I wrote short stories – a few of which appeared in online magazines or published compilations. I began two novels – both of which hit a wall after about fifty pages – and abandoned them, promising to return to them one day. I wrote short plays – which have been performed with my theatre group. I wrote a full length play – which participated in a theatre festival.

I submitted stories. I got used to rejection.

And I wrote this blog – the blog from whence my Irish Times article splurged.

The blog’s intention was to train me to write on a regular basis. To instil some discipline in me. To enlarge my mental and writing muscle.

This would inevitably lead to improvements in my more serious writing endeavours – the stories and the plays.

Or so I thought.

It hasn’t quite worked out like that.

This blog seems to have gained its own little momentum, and now seems to exist as an independent entity, with no connection to any of my other writing efforts.

In the last few months it has become the only writing that I do.

It’s not necessarily that I have writer’s block. I am not sitting at my computer, frantically struggling to come up with ideas for fiction and failing miserably.

I have ideas. It’s more a writing fatigue perhaps – I have little interest or inclination to commit to more than a blog post. It’s a lot of work to birth a play or a story. It’s easy as pie to whack out a blog post for instant gratification where you can see how many people have read it.

I am rather shallow that way I hate to admit.

Perhaps it is because I have had such a busy couple of years with my attempts that I just need a little break from ‘real writing’ for a while.

I will therefore end this navel-gazing post by stating that I have every intention of doing some fiction writing. Sooner rather than later hopefully.

For the moment however I hope my journeys to the wastelands are interesting as that’s all I feel like doing at the present time.

To the barricades Beyoncé.