*ushers off some dust and removes spiders web*
It’s been a while since I last wrote; as usual I’ve been thinking a lot about a lot of things! I’ve also been reading a lot from fiction novels (after having read five consecutive non-fiction books, I’ve decided to take a bit of a breather) to financial publications and business articles; my latest obsession are Harvard Business Review and Forbes.
Is it not funny how social media has turned us into a transparent and secret-sharing people? I once tweeted “Before Facebook asked ‘What’s on your mind’ and Twitter tweets and BBM status, what did we do with our thoughts?” and someone (male) replied “We just had voices in our heads” while another (female) said “WE KEPT DIARIES”!
And that’s it! There was once a time when we did not want anyone knowing what we were thinking; our private thoughts were private. I recall for my fourteenth birthday, my friend, Nikita bought me a diary. With a lock! I was so paranoid about who would lay their hands on it (even though it had a lock) that I devised codes for really hectic and intimated words like “boy” which was coded “gummy bear” and hug which was “marshmallow” and the big one; “kiss” which was coded “volcano”. Now try stringing together a sentence using all three and go ahead and judge at how ridiculous I must’ve sounded in a single diary entry! Now that all seems like a century ago! How I will explain to my children that there was once a time when we actually wrote our thoughts down when in 2013 we already not only want to tell people what we’re eating, we want them to see! The proof is in the pudding after all, or perhaps in the photo? Don’t you just love Instagram?!
*The pen is mightier than the sword…
At the moment I’m on a dairy-style-writing high!
I’m currently reading “Spud – Learning to Fly” and I find John van de Ruit so hilarious, at times I have to put the book down and just laugh. I grew up reading The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend so moving to Spud was only a natural progression J
I’d dedicated to reading a hundred pages of Spud a day so I could finish the book in a week but as I was half way, a friend of mine told me about a blog called **Zulu Girl Goes 2 JHB which I decided to check out, little did I know that I would be so consumed I would sacrifice my sleep to read up to the last chapter. You know that saying “The pen is mightier than the sword”? Well this blog has taken that to another level! In just under two weeks the blog as gone viral! Do not underestimate the power of social media! The issues covered have sparked discussions, some are angry, others emotional and others agitated. It speaks of the reality that we live in and will probably make a lot of parents uncomfortable about sending their daughters off to Johannesburg to study. Tomorrow morning (28 April) the author will be interviewed on Talk Radio 702 (92.7fm) so hopefully then we can all get a better understanding of how this whole concept came about?
The reason why this particular blog (Zulu Girl Goes 2 JHB ) caught my attention was because this very blog that I started was not only to share my experiences but also to keep my creative juices flowing while I work on my book which I was (or am?) hoping to get published in the near future which follows the same premise as Zulu Girl Goes 2 JHB but only half as crude and controversial. But after reading Zulu Girl Goes 2 JHB I looked at my manuscript which I’ve been working on since 2009 and thought to myself:
SHOULD I EVEN BOTHER FINISHING IT??
*“You use this proverb to say that you can solve problems or achieve your purpose better and more effectively through communication with words than by violence with weapons. Edward George Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873), an English novelist, wrote this for the first time in 1839. He wrote, ‘Beneath the rule of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword.’” (http://oels.byu.edu/student/idioms/proverbs/the_pen.html)
**Zulu Girl Goes 2 JHB can be found on the following link: http://diaryofazulugirl.tumblr.com/
I feel the need to add the disclaimer: Read at your own risk! Not for sensitive readers!
