writing | Conortje

It’s been over two years you know, my old friend

21 08 2014

Nobody blogs any more. Everyone’s on twitter cramming their exciting lives into 160 characters or fewer. I would struggle to seem interesting these days without any restrictions let alone in a short sentence or two.

I got a permanent job, moved to Dublin, got married and acquired a cat. I live a stone’s throw away from Rosie & Andrew and Back Pedal Brakes who are now bona fide ‘real friends’. We mind each others’ cats and have dinner parties. Our cottage is a sneeze away from Safari Kent and Annie. Safari Kent and I lend each other bottles of wine and invariably drink them together. He ensures I don’t go too insane and I encourage him to allow us both to become more eccentric. So you could almost say that my blogging life has turned into real life.

And nobody blogs any more. Right?

Wrong.

I spent more than a good few days reading Coffee Helps and became so immersed in her world that she woke up all sorts of dormant feelings and ideas in me. So much so that I wrote her a fan letter. It doesn’t really matter if nobody else is blogging – the best of the best is still at it.

Her superb writing made me so nostalgic. For the days of living in a foreign country, constantly meeting new people, travelling to new places, learning new languages…

I still travel a lot, just these days it’s for work. Which is great, but it’s still work. I usually cram in an extra evening or day to do a little discovery but I have a busy job so it’s never the same. Still, I won’t complain. This year I’ve been to India, Japan, San Francisco twice and have New York and Vegas coming up. All for work. It certainly beats twiddling my thumbs in Tralee looking forward to the arrival of the postman so we can chat about the weather.

I stopped blogging because I had nothing to say. Or when I did I was afraid to do it. Too many people I know read my blog and as I work in a very tech savvy environment it would have been clueless to write about my adventures in the workplace.

But reading Coffee Helps brought back all the reasons I loved it so much. The friends I made through blogging, being able to look back at a unique record of my days and looking at the world through the frame of ‘how could I write about that?’.

Plus My Very Own Newfoundlander and I are going back to The Netherlands for a holiday soon. It seems like a good time to start again. Maybe. I don’t know.

Comments : 10 Comments »

Categories : Blogging, Change of Season, work, writing

Let’s talk about sex, baby!

3 06 2011

Living in Fredericton has seen me accomplish all sorts of feats I had never even dreamed of adding to my list of things to achieve. The one I’m still quaking from is reading erotic fiction aloud to a bunch of strangers. How do I get myself into these situations?

In a double attempt to tear myself away from under My Very own Newfoundlander’s feet AND to become the next great Irish writer I joined a writing class in Fredericton, intriguingly called Writing Hurts.

MVON drove me to the first class all the while reassuring me that everything would be fine. I was petrified that the other students would actually be real writers – as opposed to a lazy blogger with aspirations far overshadowing any talent. I imagined half of them to be sporting berets and the other half to have Dublin 4 accents. Don’t worry about grammar the introduction e mail had informed us. Grammar isn’t important. This is about writing and it will hurt!

It was no wonder that I came up with ten good reasons not to open the class room door when I got there. But someone else did it for me and without time to compose myself I was facing the teacher asking are you Mr B, in a voice that resembled a startled mouse. That depends he answered in a booming authoritative voice, who are YOU?

Off to a great start I thought. When my identity had been confirmed I sat down, meekly in the corner, trying not to shake. We are going to deal with topics that are difficult to write. Immediately I thought of broken relationships, lost youth, yearning for the meaning of life…

Today we start with SEX he almost shouted. And we’ll begin straight away with your first in-class assignment. You have ten minutes to write a sex scene and then we’ll each read what we’ve written. Go! I spent the first three minutes panicking and wishing for an old fashioned grammar lesson and the last four minutes desperately scribbling something that resembled sex but could still be read out to a group of strangers without my face turning into a tomato. Or so I thought.

I’ll spare you the results and the following hour and a half. Mainly because they are locked tightly away in my enormous denial vault. Suffice it to say that I will not be launching a career in erotic fiction anytime soon. In fact I’m half tempted to dispose of my pen and join a monastery.

One thing I have learned without a doubt so far; writing DOES hurt!

Comments : 11 Comments »
Tags: embarrassment, erotic fiction, fredericton, sex, writing
Categories : Conortje and his shocking lack of direction, delusions of grandeur, Embarrassing Stories, writing

It starts out like an A word as anyone can see but somewhere in the middle it gets awful QR to me

25 07 2008

I’ve always had a unique approach to spelling. I wouldn’t go as far as saying I am dyslexic but perhaps you could say that I flirt with its first cousin on occasion . In fact, it goes deeper than this. With some words I fall at the hurdle of the very first letter. Other words I truly believe just look better the way I spell them. The word family for example, I have always felt that it was crying out for a second L. I was 18 years old before I finally accepted that yesterday and Saturday did not share the same spelling ideology despite sounding the same. Throw American Vs English spelling into the mix and it makes for one thoroughly confused Conortje. I get by through a combination of sympathetic people, polite enough to overlook my ways and with the help of my sacred spell check.

This little quirk has followed me over to any other language I attempt to write. Dutch is particularly challenging as many of their words contain more letters than the alphabet itself. A double L instead of just one, or an incorrect vowel placing can totally throw the meaning. Geel and geil for example has seen me in many the embarrassing predicament as one means yellow and the other horny.

You would think that all this would make me more understanding of others’ spelling difficulties and yet I can’t help but grumble when I spot a glaring mistake in a text. I would admit to being a deluded hypocrite if only I was able to put it in writing without the assistance of spell check. What annoys me most though is the chocolate box variety of versions my name has seen in print. Most common is Connor but I also regularly encounter Coner, Conner, Konor, Cunor and course the delightful Connard.

Always ridiculously helpful as I am, I organised a course at work on improving people’s writing skills (fret not, I was not conducting the course). The battle between relishing the irony and my utter embarrassment raged when I realised this week that I had in fact sent out a notice informing everyone of the times of their course on ‘Effectivet Written Communication’. Clearly even spell check has its off days.

Comments : 23 Comments »

Categories : Conortje's embarrassing hypocrisy, spelling, writing