I'm sure, like many new writers and publishers, bloggers and blaggers, chancers, duckers and divers not to mention overly effusive procrastinators, there's a mighty strange mix of emotions at work as one prepares to divulge the contents of one's mind. To open up to the populous in general and begin that all consuming stream of consciousness that, I have been reliably informed, constitutes a blog. Well yes it's true. There is a fair mix of emotions on the boil right now. It's a fact that some of them do indeed relate to a deep seated insecurity about one's own ability to write anything worthwhile. What, after all, would be the point of putting anything down if it bore about as much relevance to the common man - no, sorry, too condescending - the man on the street, as my old neighbour's views on the US electoral process. That particular worry will, I'm sure, pass. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, we're reliably told, and so surely it must be that interest works in much the same way. One man's meat being another man's reconstituted vegetable protein.
So yes, I'm fairly sure that worries over whether anyone will consider wasting ten minutes of their life, chewing through the gristle and wobbly bits of my weekly blog pie will pass. But emotions can be so cruel, can't they dear reader? No sooner have I fought so gallantly and so bravely to overcome worries of content, than I am suddenly stricken with angst over my unfathomable nemesis - punctuation. Punctuation for me has always been a complete mystery. I could, with a fair degree of confidence, place a full stop in more or less the right place in a sentence. Much beyond that, however, and I'm shooting in the dark. Certainly, semi-colon, colon and apostrophe territory is a barren wilderness indeed. The badlands, where cloaked and scathing individuals roam the tundra armed with nought but the sharpness of their minds, looking to catch the unwary.... in parenthesis.
Good punctuation, and indeed spelling for that matter, are of course genetic. There is a punctuation gene. It's been very well documented and it looks like an exclamation mark apparently. I don't have it, although parts of my rather minimalist family tree do. Other lesser known genes include the queuing gene, the tidying up gene and of course the cooking gene, but I digress. Beset with worry over content, spelling and punctuation, not to mention the techno-fear related to the setting up of the site in the first place, and it's a wonder I got as far as I did. It is for this precise reason that I intend to finish here and take stock. The fact that my feet also hurt and I have a blister coming from assembling too much flat pack furniture, is doubtless also a contributing factor.
So yes, I'm fairly sure that worries over whether anyone will consider wasting ten minutes of their life, chewing through the gristle and wobbly bits of my weekly blog pie will pass. But emotions can be so cruel, can't they dear reader? No sooner have I fought so gallantly and so bravely to overcome worries of content, than I am suddenly stricken with angst over my unfathomable nemesis - punctuation. Punctuation for me has always been a complete mystery. I could, with a fair degree of confidence, place a full stop in more or less the right place in a sentence. Much beyond that, however, and I'm shooting in the dark. Certainly, semi-colon, colon and apostrophe territory is a barren wilderness indeed. The badlands, where cloaked and scathing individuals roam the tundra armed with nought but the sharpness of their minds, looking to catch the unwary.... in parenthesis.
Good punctuation, and indeed spelling for that matter, are of course genetic. There is a punctuation gene. It's been very well documented and it looks like an exclamation mark apparently. I don't have it, although parts of my rather minimalist family tree do. Other lesser known genes include the queuing gene, the tidying up gene and of course the cooking gene, but I digress. Beset with worry over content, spelling and punctuation, not to mention the techno-fear related to the setting up of the site in the first place, and it's a wonder I got as far as I did. It is for this precise reason that I intend to finish here and take stock. The fact that my feet also hurt and I have a blister coming from assembling too much flat pack furniture, is doubtless also a contributing factor.
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