meta

I’ve been blogging for over a year now, and I like to think I’ve got the hang of it. It occurred to me that I’ve never really gone into depth into the whys and wherefores of Unintentionally Blank (this name did seem much wittier when I first thought of it, by the way). A lot of the time I’m writing for the sheer sake of writing; having people read it isn’t massively important, although the amount of time I spend poring over the WordPress stats would imply otherwise.

Back at the tender age of 14 I kept a diary, which has thankfully been lost to the mists of time. Thinking back on it, it was a pretty wanky thing to do, even for a 14 year-old boy. On a side note, did boys even keep diaries? Had I been ruthlessly infected by American kids’ TV shows where the perky cheerleader’s first kiss with the local heartthrob was breathlessly recorded, analysed and reanalysed, before being cruelly mocked by a snot-nosed little brother? Anyway, even back then I found it difficult to maintain any kind of schedule, with huge gaps between entries, a trend that thankfully only partially continued when I started diarising(?) things here.

My “process” isn’t a particularly complicated one. Since I’ve been following the DailyPost’s PostAWeek schedule, I’m writing about anything that comes to mind, however trivial it may be (including blogging itself). Startling efficiency at my job (coughs), coupled with a monitor that no-one else can see means I’ve often got time to kill at work, so I’ll spend a few days piecing something together into a cohesive post. I rarely have moments where I think “Aha! This must be blogged!”, it tends to be a idle thought that happens to deserve a bit of exposition. Thursdays have become my normal posting day, mainly because I can access WordPress while I’m in the office. Clearly it’s gone a bit askew these past couple of weeks, but I’ve actually had some work to do for a change. Once I’ve got something that I deem worthy of publishing, I’ll spend a fair bit of time editing it, changing sentence structures, replacing words, adding and removing pieces every so often. This bit often continues after I’ve published, occasionally weeks after the act. One thing that does bug me about blogging is my own writing style, insofar as I think it’s quite distinctive, and possibly a bit derivative too (an online tool I once found compared my writing to both Lewis Carroll and J.K. Rowling). I’m probably being over-critical, but as long as I keep on blogging, hopefully I’ll hone my skills.

 

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