No, this is not a Picasso! And yes, the white part on the left is the wall.
“When I was a child my mother used to say to me: If you become a soldier, you will be general; if you become a priest, you will be the Pope. However, I decided to be a painter and I became Picasso.”
First time I heard about this quote, I thought Picasso was one of the most egocentric people in the world, and chances there are this is true. Yet, I loved the quote and I found myself reading it again and again, till I thought what Picasso really meant was that, in order to get the best out of ourselves, we should work on our biggest passions without fear of failure…
The next step was to ask to myself what I enjoyed the most, and I decided it was to always challenge myself, get in touch with different cultures, digest them, and then regurgitate the same material in a new form, filtered by my past experiences and my way to see the world.
“Why?” seemed to ask the eyes of my father every time I turned down a new offer for a respectable and well-paid steady job.
To come to China, of course!
This blog was not something I planned, in Italy we don’t have (not yet) the “culture” of start a blog when we move to another country…
However, I’ve been overwhelmed by the tragicomic experiences I’m living: the everyday fights with the language and the Chinese bureaucracy, my travels by train all around China or another girl that broke up with me (“我分手!” Haha) because “You are not enough Chinese my dear“.
In fact I’m not Chinese at all MY DEAR, but this is a juicy story I will let for another day…
Anyway, after a while I felt compelled to write down facts and thoughts in a notebook. It was not like I chose. Just, I couldn’t avoid it, especially when I was sitting in a train or waiting for my delayed plane…
“There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.”
The War of Art, Steven Pressfield.
And then I found myself digging deeper and deeper on my craft, mixing my writings, organizing them on my old laptop and transforming them in stories… and then my stories started to be A LOT, and I began to see them as a whole, I began to see the shadow of a book.
Now don’t get me wrong, is not like I’m going to publish my book next week. I’m still writing the draft and I have no idea on how to contact an agent or an editor…
Anyway, the problem is that a book is not a diary, you need to make choices, cut the digressions, go straight to the point!
However, I liked my continue digressions, I didn’t want to put them aside or forget about them. At the same time I was developing a strong passion for photography, mostly because of the wonderful places I was visiting…
And this is how this blog was born. An hybrid object photo-diary-travel-storytelling blog that in my original intention should have allowed me to show my photos to the world, promote a book that doesn’t exist yet, and keep track of my thoughts and impressions about China…
And then an interesting stuff happened to me. At night, instead of work at my book (daytime I have a full-time job eh!), I found myself working more and more at this blog, which is now monopolizing all of my creative energy…
Yup, I fell in love with blogging and here I am, writing yet another post!
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[...] Genesis of a blog. [...]