Step One: The first step

"Even the longest journey begins with a single step"

Attributed to Lao-tzu (c 604-c 531 bc), founder of Taoism

The desire to produce something 'finished' - something honed and polished, that perfectly encapsulates my thinking - is the key reason why I haven't done something like this before. After all, it's been a loooong time in the gestation.

I guess the traditional way of writing, where the author writes, re-reads, edits and re-writes their work is laborious and time-consuming. And it produces something 'finished'.

But the perfectionist instinct goes hand-in-hand with a sense of procrastination or defeatism. "I can't possibly write anything, because I don't have the time to get it just right...and I'm not sure that I really have anything very interesting to say, anyway...." And so another 6 months goes by, without having actually produced anything.

So. For me, a new credo, a new set of blog rules:

1. Doing *something* not moderately well is much better than doing nothing perfectly
2. Get a stake in the ground. It may or may not lead-on to something else
3. Perpetual beta: It's OK to come back to something later, and continue to revise and hone it
4. Chronology doesn't matter. You don't have to wait until you have introduced the characters before writing about the action
5. Experimentation and play are the lifeblood of creativity
6. I'm more of an impressionist than a photo-realist. (ie it's the emotion you convey and impact that you have that counts. Technical expertise is not an end in itself)

Enough of the navel-gazing. Time to write...

Prologue

The idea of Writing A Blog has long been at the back of my mind.

The attraction is both personal and public; part confessional, part sermon.

In my 20s, I kept a diary for a couple of years or so, in the period after I graduated when I was traveling a lot, and wanted a record of the places and people, and the things that I'd done: a simple aide-memoire, that spoke to my fear of losing the memory.

Re-reading it now, however, it's clear that the more interesting (and more enduring) elements of the exercise were the insight it gives into both my emotional state at the time (a kind of emotional barometer) - and my rationalisation of how the two components (what I was doing and how I was feeling) worked together... in essence providing the reference point for Where I Was At.

So, I guess the key difference for diary vs blog comes down to two things: audience and objective.

This blog needs an audience. Firstly, I want to avoid the tendency for navel-gazing that could afflict a simple diary. I'm not sure I have any sense of who that audience could (or should) be for this blog...but as a way of moderating and curating my thoughts, I think a sense of audience is important. So, in a Brontë-esque way ("Dear Reader"), my first intent is to make this as personal and conversational as possible. Hopefully, that way it'll be readable too...

And the objective. Well, I'm going to aim for the intersection of doing and feeling - and in the process, I hope to be able to draw out something more, that gets to the heart of Where I Am At - but that also translates to something that You, Dear Reader, will actually want to bloody well read.

Here, in hope, we go!