Every online writer eventually has to write something about writing… it’s a sort of right of passage or something. If you spend any time reading blogs, journals or other similiar written works on the web you’ll see that eventually the author writes about writing. So that I don’t feel left out here is my post of “writing about writing” or should that be “writing about writing about writing” ? …

Writing for this website gives me the opportunity to escape from the real world into a world of my own making. In this world I and my army of dust bunnies rule and keep order.. and you my loyal subjects readers come by and occationally read the nonsense I’ve put up and loudly proclaim my genius. Well that’s the idea anyway…

I write alot more than I actually put up on this site. I’ve got about 15 un-finished posts at any given time and have notes for about 40 more. And now that I’ve started running this site I find my self constantly making notes about things or wishing I had my camera with me so that I can capture some or other moment that I wanted to share. My biggest problems are finding time to actually write stuff and finding stuff that I can safely write about.

Time – I work all day.. and when I get home (normally around 6:30 – 7:00) I just want to eat and goto sleep and stay as far away from computers as possible and watch tv or read a book or on rare occations browse the web a bit. I’m normally up early to get to work (normally up at about 6:30 – 7:00) which doesn’t leave much time at night to write and during the day I’m working… I often end up working through lunch so I can’t even use that time. So what I do is scribble notes down or quickly type them somewere when I get an idea and a few free moments, then I hope that I can decipher my notes and actually write up what I was thinking in my copious free time. This is why it looks like I only post on weekends, it’s not that I write everything then it’s just that it’s the only time I get to sit down and finish off all the half written posts that I have.

Safety – This site carries my name and my friends and family visit it, this means that there are certain things that are “not safe” to discuss. For example if I were to say something along the lines of “My friends sister (or girlfriend) is really hot and has incredible breasts” (all hypothetically of course… not that theres anything wrong with my friends girlfriends or there sisters…) I would probably get beaten up by my friend… have some family members and friends throw a party in honour of me and the fact that I have discovered women and get a number of phone calls, sms’s, emails and visits from concerned members of family and friends who want to show me the error of my ways. It’s therefor much easier to avoid certain topics altogether. I’m also employed and my employers customers know me.. and therefor I can’t say things like “I had a really bad day at work.” or “One of our idiot customers phoned about xyz” as I may loose my job.. or worse yet cost my employer money.

Due to these monumental problems and the fact that I tend to procrastinate alot it is a miracle that I actually manage to write anything on this site…

I have a peculiar way of writing these posts, it’s best described as evolutionary. I start out with an idea, normally a few lines and a topic although sometimes I don’t even have that and just “wing it”. I then tend to just write stuff, randomly about the topic and sometimes off topic often it makes no real sense and I get the order all wrong and write things I don’t really want to write or shouldn’t. It’s at about this point that the evolution bit kicks in… I read through the post shuffling the bits and pieces of text into the right order and deleting those bits that don’t fit or saving them somewere safe if they really good but off topic. I then go through it again and add bits here and there and take bits away, I keep doing this until I’m “happy” with the post and I then finally post it. In this way only the strongest bits survive.

This way of writing is better suited to working on a computer where you can copy and paste and move bits of text around easily than on paper. It’s also very different to the way that I was taught to write in school where everything had to follow a set layout and rules. In school we had to plan things.. you couldn’t just write, you had to have a plan as to what you wanted to write about and what you were going to say and it always had to be x number of words or more… I never understood why if I could say what I wanted to say in less words I should be penalised.

Now if you’ll excuse me… me and my army of dust bunnies need to finish off a few other posts…