The other day I was searching on Google for something totally unrelated to this website and it came up twice during my searches: this result made me guilty and proud at the same time.

The source of the pride thing is probably pretty obvious - anyone who has any kind of website, even one as small and poorly cared for as this one wants people to look at it every now and again, and perhaps appreciate what (if anything) they find there - but the guilt drowned out my lack of humility because it had been so long since I'd actually posted anything new here.

In fact, I hadn't even checked the home page (that's just how abandoned poor old BCN Writing is) and I found some evil looking Warning goobledy-gook. But I also saw, logging in here to write these few lines, that two people were apparently looking at my site at that very moment (well, it is a wet Saturday evening in Barcelona). So, action is needed.

The plan is this then, to use this front page as a kind of blog for anything vaguely interesting / relevant that I can think to write to do with the themes of Barcelona and writing, preferably as a joint concept, but that can't always be guaranteed. I'll keep the info sections pretty much as they are, but will also try to keep updating them. 

To begin: a book I'm currently dipping in to (I rarely actually read books at the moment, work, baby daughter, flat buying, life all put paid to that) is '20 lines a day' by the US poet Harry Mathews. Based on a phrase from Stendhal (I admit, didn't know who that was - for anyone else out there who isn't familiar, he was a 19th-century French writer. Wikipedia him here) that urged writers to produce "20 lines a day, genius or not", Mathews tried to write 20 lines every day for a year. He didn't totally succeed, but did end up with a diary, collection of observations and other musings or inspirations that were later published. I find some of his entries dense (not in the 'stupid' meaning, clearly. This man is pretty much a genius from what I can see) and hard work, but his poetic calling shines through, and what's more he lives between Paris, a small French town and New York while the first scribblings were done in St. Barth's. With that lifestyle, I might too be a genius.But it is a good little read, overall, and because each entry is short and pretty self-contained, it is perfect for my current reading requirements.

Elsewhere, I finally got my first copy of the New York Review of Books (I subscribed a few years ago, but stopped it because, well there was too much else going on to find time to read it, but I always preferred it to its London cousin and did miss it; this year for my birthday, my husband kindly re-subscribed me. I've been getting emails from them for a few weeks, but with those bad boy articles, I need the real thing in my hand). Looking forward to my intellectual level soaring by about 500 percent. 

Right, that's it for now.  I'm going to work hard to keep this going - let's see how I do...