First

Ever think of something that you’d like to talk about? Something that makes you say to yourself, “That would actually make a really good blog topic – I must write that down.” Then some muppet calls to complain they’ve forgotten how to switch their computer on, and your earth-shatteringly important topic, indeed a topic so genre-defining that it would have reshaped the entire blogosphere, if not the Information Superhighway itself.

I haven’t. When I think of something to write about, to talk about, even to look up online, I try to scribble it on a piece of paper, or fire it into a Word document, or an OpenOffice document if I’m at home where I can’t afford MS Office, and my girlfriend won’t let me buy pirate software from the guy at the market.

This means I tend to have notebooks full of one and two line jottings, quotes and questions, text files with one line, one word, one parapgraph. Street names in the city I work in, that sound familiar and I’d like to find out if they’re near my office; Quotes I think might sound good from one of the characters in one of my long-delayed short stories; Song titles from my iPod that I want to put in a playlist when I get home.

I’ve considered giving up hope of a writing career, but continuing with these demented, fractured ramblings, only to collate them at some undetermined point in the future, when I really do feel older or grown-up, and publish them then, in the hopes of passing my work off as some kind of poetry, and myself as a modern-day Bashō.

That should do for a taster of what this blog will feel like – I’ll introduce myself properly in a day or two.