lostdog unlosted

'Scuse me while I blow the dust off this blog. Now please pardon my coughing fit.

Been a long time, hasn't it? Reading back over the other stuff wot I wrote here, seems like a lifetime ago. Much has happened in the meantime - new job being the biggest thing - but I won't bore you with the details. Or rather, I won't bore myself with the details, because I already know the details, and I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who's ever going to read this.

To cut a long story short - ditched shit job in favour of great job. Kind of bullshitted my way through interview, which resulted in me getting great job but not actually knowing what it entailled. Enter steep learning curve, stage right. Our hero (that's me, by the way) valiantly battles ignorance in his every waking moment, with his Mighty Sword of Google coming in most handy at crucial moments.

Anyways - the upshot of this wee tiny epic tale is that I was really busy for a while trying to find out what I've actually been employed to do, but now I think I have a bit more of a handle on it so I have a little more time to waste writing drivel on this blog. Lucky me/you.

What I do now is write stuff for websites to get them better rankings in Google and other search engines. And I love it. If I can wax poetical for a moment: I've always considered myself a writer, even when I wasn't actually writing anything. Like all other aspiring writers, I had ideas for stuff to write, but never actually put them down on paper. Never even made a stab at writing them.

I think that's what stops most "aspiring writers" from being writers - once it's down there in black and white, it's no longer the perfect, flawless idea that inspired you to write it in the first place. I've got a friend who's wanted to write the actual true story of Macbeth for as long as I've known him - he knows more about that badly maligned bloke than anyone, but he's still scrabbling about for a start point.

What my new job has taught me thus far is this - just write. It's never going to be perfect, and there's always going to be more people who hate it than love it, but if you can capture just one person's imagination for a moment, then it's worth doing. I literally wince at some of the stuff I write - but once the words are down there like physical objects then I can shuffle them about (fire a few of the lazy ones) and juggle with the rest.

Having to write to a tight deadline about stuff I know nothing about for a living has been a real revelation to me. It's teaching me the craftsmanship of writing - at the moment I'm selling all sorts of guff to people I'll never meet - I'm coming to realise that a lot of modern writers are very self-indulgent and are writing for themselves rather than for their readers.

All writing is lying. Words are always a poor compromise for the thoughts that spawned them. Words obscure more than they make clear, and a good writer always hovers in the ambiguous space left by what they didn't actually write.

Still want to saddle up a hippo, though. With giraffes doing a slow sarcastic handclap in the background.