Monk Quixote

Hello blog, my old friend. I have — with equal degrees of non-success, kept a blog for going on 10 years now. I have never really built a rhythym of post­ing, or a read­er­ship, or really got what I wanted out of it.

Ini­tially, I wrote a blog because I was lonely. And it’s dif­fi­cult to see self-indulgence when the mir­ror has no back. Before blog­ging I belonged to var­i­ous mail­ing lists and a cou­ple of telnet-based chats. I wouldn’t join in much — just occa­sion­ally writ­ing screeds of tightly wound non­sense, usu­ally while drunk. Blog­ging was part of the same thing, really — just bark­ing at the moon. Some­one! Please! Pay me some attention!

But not too much.

At var­i­ous times I tried to write poetry or short fic­tion via the blog, but it didn’t really work out. It’s also not much of a sub­sti­tute for letter-writing (I used to write epics up until my mid-twenties — prob­a­bly until I started work­ing online, in fact). I never really worked out who I was writ­ing for, or to.

The most ‘suc­cess­ful’ period of the blog was when I sim­ply used it as a sta­tis­ti­cal diary. A web log, in the for­mal sense. How many words writ­ten, miles run, idle thoughts wasted. It did at least serve some sort of pur­pose, and it is vaguely amus­ing for me to review it once every cou­ple of years (I’ve taken most of my old blogs down over the years).

I keep a blog — and this domain — purely because I still live in the per­haps naive hope that I will be pub­lished, that some­how doc­u­ment­ing the process will be worth­while — or from a mar­ket­ing view­point, nec­es­sary. But again, this lack of clar­ity of pur­pose leads to a lack of engage­ment — from me, from my non-existent read­ers. And as a writer if your heart’s not in it, then why should you expect a reader to care?

And blog­ging itself — well… the inter­net winds have shifted — first to social net­works, now to twit­ter, soon to short allit­eral grunts via face­time or some­such, who knows? An aug­mented real­ity feed straight into your neural cor­tex -> Walk down this street and see it as Paris Hilton sees it! Think like Justin Bieber. Taste like Neil Gaiman. Etc.  I’ve been there at or near the begin­ning of most of these ‘phe­nom­ena’, but not really estab­lished a use, or a niche, or engaged much. I just kind of wan­der in, reserve a user­name, fum­ble about a bit, and then realise that my online life pretty much mir­rors my offline life.

For some­one who has made a liv­ing from being a cre­ative gen­er­al­ist (damned with faint praise) and gen­er­ally solv­ing prob­lems in some form of cre­ative fash­ion, I have been remark­able uncre­ative in my online activ­i­ties. I have not started memes. I haven’t made pretty pic­tures which other peo­ple have stolen with­out attri­bu­tion. In fact, damn it, I don’t think I’ve even had any of my blog posts hoovered up by some emo high school stu­dent and shared as her own angst. And every­one has that claim to fame.…I have not become a guru. I have not become any­thing much.

When I left my last employer I had some re-career train­ing, try­ing to re-focus into a copy­writer, or fea­tures writer. Any­thing with the word ‘writer’ in it. Except under­writer. That would have involved an even longer hia­tus. Any­hoo, I had a very pleas­ant day writ­ing with a jour­nal­ist (I was the only per­son on the course) who asked me what my spe­cial­ism was. And I couldn’t really answer him, beyond the life and times of me (and even then, my friends, par­ents and ex-girlfriends have quite dif­fer­ent ver­sions of that topic). I know a lit­tle about a lot, and what I don’t know, I know where to find. I can’t pre­tend otherwise.

So any­way, next year, as Del Trot­ter would have it, there will be change. And blood. Pos­si­bly, depend­ing on what I get for Christ­mas. I will find some­thing to be good at. And, if nec­es­sary, tell peo­ple about it.

Oth­er­wise, I think it’s prob­a­bly time to let this blog per­sona go. I’ve just done a cur­sory edit on the above (is it just me that always expands things when they’re edit­ing? I’ve never known a shorter sec­ond draft, but I digress) and I realised I was vaguely enjoy­ing myself. I like putting one word after the other. Play­ing with rhythym. Tan­gen­tal­is­ing. Mak­ing nouns into verbs. And word soup.

But that’s what the novel is for. I haven’t writ­ten any of the sec­ond novel since May. I’ve been busy doing noth­ing and being gen­er­ally inef­fi­cient. In fact, I’d like that as my epi­taph — ‘gen­er­ally inef­fi­cient’. Per­haps there is a lit­tle of the Dougals Adams spirit left in me after all.

This blog. Gen­er­ally inefficient.

Be excel­lent to each other.