Loose scatterage, with smatterings of sense

Okay, a rare update... and in the spirit of live television, I'm going for absolute stream-of-consciousness writing, which means the Backspace key is only allowed for typing errors. Prepare yourself for dribble (and, most likely, plenty of brackets... sorry, this is how I think on paper keyboards), while I explain why I'm doing this.

It may not have escaped your attention, unless you're deeply uninterested in bent back tulips (in which case... oh, never mind), that my blogging frequency has plummeted in the last eight weeks. This is because - and I'll stop whingeing about this at some point - I have no time. My weekday life is: Get up, go to work, work (no internetting available), come home, spend an hour reading emails and blogs, and desperately trying to catch up with the couple of hundred daily messages on alt.fan.pratchett, have dinner, chat on IRC, go to bed. And yes, the "chat on IRC" is quite essential to my day and I'm not giving it up to make time for other things :-) Weekends, especially Saturdays, are generally quite busy and Sunday seems to be (sad as it is) my day for trying to shoot off some emails, and for catching up with the week's television. Which I'll never be able to do if BBC2 keeps showing Buffy Series 7 three times a week. Won't. Cope.

I used to find it awkward to write informal things - even formal informal things (but on the other hand, writing informal formal things was always fine. As was writing formal things. Keep up) - and this showed when I started blogging. After a few months however, my writing style had loosened up a lot and it was no hassle to dash off a number of paragraphs and still have it be a perfectly legible and relatively well-written article. My ease of writing improved even more when I started writing a personal diary journal (it's not a diary. I don't have a diary. I'm not someone who keeps a diary. It's a journal, okay?) just because of the sheer quantity of writing I was doing. Lately this quantity has dropped off to almost zero, and it's for this reason as well as the lack of time that my blogging's been suffering.

I have been doing things... writing bits and pieces (although mostly bits), dabbling in bent back tulips redesigns (crossbrowser CSS authoring is a nightmare, browser hacks are horrible, and I hate browsers). Mostly, though, things remain unfinished and linger, which is what tends to happen with my 'projects'. I have a dozen unwritten and partially written draft posts which I've tried to write, but I get stuck with. The ideas are there, but the expression's gone. I've always been a perfectionist, and if any of my writing isn't up to my standards, most of the time I'd rather not release it than publish something which I'll cringe at in a few days' or weeks' time. This is why I start forming paragraphs, then get discouraged, think "No, this sucks", and hastily cast it aside again.

Not this post, however. However dull the content, however ghastly the sentence structure, however much the entire thing resembles unfinished and incomplete thought, I'm damn well posting this today, and not having it hang around and eventually deleted. And hopefully you'll be slightly entertained by it before you finish reading it.

Too much waffle, too much waffle, cut back... another reason why my stream-of-consciousness writing isn't well-structured. And why this is looking like an increasingly bad idea. I have been known to carry on entire conversations with myself for half an hour or more. I've been known to sit down and just write in rambling yet coherent fashion for a couple of hours or more. Every day for a couple of weeks.

So, conclusion: there's usually a lot of writing going on behind the scenes, most of which you won't want to read but which exercises my writing habits so that when I come to actually writing properly (ie. for bbt), I can. However, my definition of "usually" is now not valid, and won't be so until August or September next year (when my contract ends). At the moment, bbt is about the only writing I have time for (and there's little enough of that) and so consequently quality and therefore frequency of writing is dropping on the whole. The sad state of affairs is that I'm now aiming for ten posts a month. This is, emphatically, Not Good. Still, I'm going to try to maintain what semblance of a blog I now have, and hopefully you won't lose patience with me. (Yes, yes I know; it's my own damn blog and I'm not under obligation to anyone; I don't have to write anything; I'll write what I like, when I like and you lot can take what you're given. I know. In theory this is true, but really, it's the readers and commenters who are important and who motivate the author. Else this wouldn't be sitting on a world-wide publically accessible internet server, would it?)

Okay. And that was just the intro ;-) More tomorrow, hopefully.