What's your excuse?

My blog is three weeks and one day old. It barely survived its first week; after a few days I considered committing infanticide. I got the heebie-jeebies that someone might actually read it and panicked about how that would make me feel.

It’s not that I mind people reading what I write: my job title says ‘writer’ and my CV is covered in ‘journalist’. Work writing is different though – it’s generally reportage or instruction, rather than opinion or a peek into the personality behind it. It’s also tailored to fit the needs of an audience.

Over the years straddling the change of century, I kept a diary. There were four volumes – proper A4, hard-backed, page-a-day tomes. I chronicled my ups and downs, I poured out my woes, gave nicknames to people and bitched like mad. It wasn’t written for anybody but me. Occasionally, I thought “I’ll use this misery or episode in a novel one day”, but I would have crucified – or at least removed the hands and tongue – of anyone who had read it.

My blog isn’t particularly soul-baring, and it isn’t tailored to an audience. I suppose it gives me a creative outlet and allows me to paint a different picture of my part of the world, a place that other bloggers and readers have glossed over with gloomy grey. It’s certainly having one positive effect – I’m ranting a little less in the real world than I was.