Imagine that, my first ever tentative footsteps on the blogosphere involved quoting Jim Reeves! Hardly typical of me, and I promise you that this will not be a Jim Reeves related blog, though thinking about it I've now got the sudden urge to go Google "Jim Reeves blog" and see what turns up. Dammit, I was trying not to get bogged down in this Jim Reeves tangent, and now I'm totally stuck as to how to get out.
Anyway, as someone who jealously holds on to his Newspaper Society press card despite it having long expired, its hard to get one's head round the concept of writing for free. I'm going to write and not get paid? What the hell's the point of that?! So here's the concept kids - I'm going to ramble and rant about anything that grabs my fancy. Chances are, it'll be about my total immersion in Pop Culture. Books, TV, film, comics - anything I'm enjoying, I'll share my thoughts with you. The one thing I miss about journalism is reviewing, so I'll concentrate on that. I'll start tomorrow with a little glimpse into my sensibilities by talking about some of my current favourites.
And as I always preached to the poor buggers I was editing, writing is a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger and more flexible it gets. Any writing will make you a better writer further down the line. So, I'm going to practice what I preach and just write for the hell of it, in the interest of building my withered, neglected writing muscles back up to full strength. Arrgh! Enough of this corny metaphor! I'm going to bed - I'm knackered and hungover, and have to get up early tomorrow for my real job - more on that later - so I'll be back tomorrow during my lunchbreak to knock out more autobiographical anecdotes masquerading as profound wisdom. Every damn year I start a diary, thinking pretty much the same thing - get back into the habit of writing, Mark! It all counts, just churning out any old crap will help get the chops back up! These diarys usually stop late February/early March. But, hey! What little writing I've managed in those couple of months is usually top notch! Hopefully this being posted on the internet will shame me into not falling back into my worst failing - sloth.
* a short note on the proliferation of exclamation marks in my writing: some years ago, I realised that Marvel Comics supremo Stan Lee was easily the most influential writer on my childhood development. I was pretty fond of Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain, too, but it was Stan's love of hyperbole and alliteration that stuck with me. Don't worry, I'm quite comfortable with it. How I came to this realisation, and how it affected the project I was working on at the time, is a story for another time. Come to think of it, my habit of trailing off on wacky tangents probably came from Mark Twain. But maybe Ronnie Corbett. Or Billy Connelly.