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Saturday, July 16, 2011

Apparently I am addicted

Cate has said that I am not allowed to stop blogging. She says that she enjoys reading my blogs too much. Not that you would know this. I get no comments ever and only say – every Shrove Tuesday – she gives a throwaway line like ‘I enjoyed your blog today.’

Still that’s more than Dexter gets for his work. What an awful thing to do such fine work and to not be able to be appraised for it. No Annual Performance Review. Certainly no 360 – at least 180° is missing.

I think Cate’s sentiment is ‘Fuck your Spark!’

But – I am addicted to blogging. And to tell you the truth this comment from Steph brought me back to life and made me realize that I needed to pull myself together. What a girl. Stillwater will be rocking when we get together!

Some people think it is easy to write blogs and sometimes it is. Mostly it is hard.

I am not a good writer but I have read many good books and I have read many writers writing about writing and all of them without exception say it is hard. ‘real’ authors fart in the general direction of bloggers and hold us in contempt. We are not real writers. It takes a ‘real’ writer to sit down and slog through a ‘real’ book banging out page after page day after day.

Well I decided that while my blogs are not likely to end up in the Library of Congress – I should preserve them because I have in fact started writing a book about my life and times in Vienna and the way Google has been going lately it is only a matter of time before it vaporizes all its blogs. In fact I would not be surprised if Google loses the whole planet – it can never find my Picasa photo stream.

According to Google I can back up to hard disk - but this clags out after a couple of minutes and there are lots of potential solutions on the Internet all of which I cannot get to work so finally I just printed the fucking thing using Feedfabrik.

So for the period when I started the blog – September 2008 until June 2011 I have two volumes each of 700 odd pages contained every precious word. Some of which I am very proud. Some are crap. This is the nature of writing. The good stuff will form the basis of the book I write.

So that includes photos but if we take those out that is still a decent sized novel that I would be happy to stack up against some of the shit that I have read in my lifetime – including I might add – the Dan Brown novel Digital Fortress which was the greatest load of puerile childish nonsensical hogwash that I have ever read and that I threw half read – with uncanny accuracy – into a rubbish bin – from a distance of 10 meters - at San Francisco airport.

Admittedly I was tired and emotional at the time as we were in the middle of a 14 hour layover. Don’t ask.

Oh – and everything Jackie Collins ever wrote.

But I think that what I should not do is try to blog every day . That is the killer. I will show Cate how to play Angry Birds – that will solve the problem.   

10 comments:

  1. Oh, I enjoyed this very much, reading about half of it out loud to my wife. I had told her a little bit ahead of time what you had been going through lately. Yes, I agree, a key to blogging is to not force yourself to a daily routine.

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  2. Ha! yep - Dan Brown is right near the top of my Top Shit Writers Of All Time list. Along with Jeffrey Archer, Steig Larsson, Jackie Collins, James Patterson.... etc.

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  3. I am with Cate and Steph.
    Long write the King!

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  4. me to - also, i just arrived in the states and found out what angry birds was - your blog is way better.

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  5. Excellent points - especially Dan Brown. I just don't "get" his writing style.

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  6. I'm with Cate and Steph. Thank god for them. It is most curious that the thoughts of a total stranger discussing some of the minutiae of his life should be such compelling reading..

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  7. Ok I get the message. Just wait until I start the subscription service!

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  8. yay! so glad you're back to blogging.

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  9. Jim says he completely agrees with all that you've said about writing. And that you certainly shouldn't do it everyday, particularly when you don't feel like it, because then you'd be a professional.

    I'm very glad you've saved your blogs and plan to edit them into a book. That would introduce many new readers to your blog. BTW, I'm told you need at least 1,000 to start a subscription site.

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