With one bound...

My last blog post evidently came across as quite negative, judging by some of the feedback I got. This was unintentional and was probably because it was going to be a long involved piece but I ran out of time and lost patience with it and just shoved it up.

And that is the beauty and, perhaps, the point of blogs...as if there needs to be one.

When I started the blog in May 2013 (and yes the name did come to me in a vision...) I had the idea of it being a mixture of writing about politics, the weirdness of the world and bits of memoir about the past.

I soon realised this was going to be a struggle as I can't write any non-fiction without researching it to death and I just didn't have the time. Looking back, my blog looks like a metaphor for my life: good intentions, broken promises, hasty decisions and a retreat into my imagination.

It's just over a year since I started writing 'The universe wants to play with you (TUWTPWY).' For my entire life, I've been dabbling with creative writing but I've never been satisfied with any of it but I was suddenly struck by the idea of writing something in serial form and just publishing it as it is; a bit like a public first draft.

The downside is the difficulty of maintaining a cohesive style as I often just write it straight into the blog and I tend to go with the ideas in my head (you should see them...) rather than planning it out in advance. I've tried to turn necessity into a virtue but to be honest, I'm happy enough with it as it is and the writing is primarily for me. If anyone else reads it and enjoys it, that's even better. If I had more time and could type with more than two fingers, I'd be a lot further ahead.

The current section is taking a long time, despite being relatively short, because I can't get the right tone so I'm probably going to employ the 'Jack' strategy. This is based on a, perhaps, apocryphal anecdote about a British comics cartoonist, and I've heard the story told about different people, who finished one weeks serial with Jack, the hero, tied to a stake on a railway line with a train approaching. As the deadline for the next issue got nearer, the cartoonist hadn't turned up so the other writers/illustrators tried to work out a way for Jack to escape but just couldn't. At the last minute, the original cartoonist reappears, draws Jack bursting out of his ropes accompanied by the caption, 'with one bound, Jack was free.' I always use this idea when I'm getting tied up in trying to move a story on.

While I'm going to continue writing the Universe series, I'm also working on a short story and I want to get back to writing more political and other non-fiction.