Writing on the Wallpaper

After all the vain threats to whack the kitten just now, I notice that John and I tied with 37 comments each (until I conceded by adding a further one on his site, as a result of fear and a cry for help). I even ended up with a few extra followers, despite being the villain.

One commenter actually said that he could not understand why I was so keen to have comments left, because he thought that bloggers only wrote for themselves. Only for themselves? Is this a symptom of low self-esteem? I would not bother to write a word if I thought that absolutely nobody was going to read it, but I would carry on writing pages of this drivel if I thought I only had one reader, but I suppose that is called a 'letter'.

There are several sure-fire ways to increase your ratings in any social media outlet (particularly red-top tabloids), and I think I managed to tick all the boxes - except sex - at once. Heaven knows what would have happened if I had thrown sex into the mix. The editors of The Sun newspaper have - along with All-In Wrestlers - long ago discovered that people love to have someone to hate, like the pantomime villain at Christmas - "BOO!"

When I recently tried to send a video-clip to a 28 year old friend of mine, he kept saying that he hadn't seen it yet, as he had not checked his email for a while. After about a month, it dawned on me that nobody under the age of 40 who is not in business actually uses email these days - they all use FaceBook.

Then I realised that hardly any sane person under the age of 40 has a blog either, which explains why there are so many mad old men and women out there in the blogging world (myself included, btw!).

I have long since stopped reading any blogs which deal with the problems of writing in general, and getting yourself an agent/publisher in particular. I'm sorry to any of you Bookanistas who might still take a peep at this blog every now and then, but nothing sends me to sleep quicker that writing about writing - yes, I know that this is just what I am doing here, but not for long.

If you blog purely to get advice about the practice of 'writing', fine, but my advice is just get on with it and keep your angst to yourselves. In any event, short of finding you an agent just to shut you up, what is anyone else going to tell you that you do not already know? That it's difficult? You don't say! Contrary to what everyone seems to think, I don't believe that writing is a lonely, solitary business - you meet all sorts of people whilst wandering around in your own head, and sometimes you begin to wish that they would just leave you alone (Uh-oh - he's starting to sound like he has a medical condition...)

Then there is the Lifestyle blog, which seems to consist of house-proud, obsessive-compulsives who cannot ever settle on any particular shade of Lavender for their tidy/cluttered study, so resort to the comfort of cake-making to take their minds off it. A friend of mine bought a new house once, and invited me round soon after he moved in. He asked if I would like to take a look upstairs, and I said 'no thank you'. Incredulous, he wondered why on earth not, and I told him that I had already been upstairs in a house once before, and I knew all about 'upstairs', so didn't need to look at his, thanks very much.

I imagine that it can get quite lonely on a remote and rural homestead with only chickens or sheep for company, and that blogging is a good way of getting out and about to share thoughts and ideas with other creatures who have brains a little larger than the average pea, but I live in the middle of town and am surrounded by other people - so why do I run a blog?

Well, of course I am a bit of an egomaniac, but I like to be entertained as well. I kid myself that about one post in every ten or so is entertaining to other/some people (actually, let's not be too modest - I bloody well know it is), but I would make sure that the success rate would be higher than that if I was being paid for it. In fact, the people paying for it would insist that it was higher than that, or sack me. So I have no incentive to fail or succeed in whatever I am doing here, which means I can usually get away with a refreshing splash of insults to enhance the genuine compliments that I sometimes give out to fellow bloggers. Having said that, I think I might have picked up a couple of unbalanced stalkers from the 'pussy' post.

Here is a blogger who never fails with her evocative mix of prose and pictures - you can smell the sea in her writing: Sarah Toa. You won't find her sharing the pain of writing with polite but unwilling strangers.

So why do you blog? Be honest.