Sunday 4 March 2007

And you may begin...

I once heard it said that it was a particularly male foible to obsess over the fist line of a piece of writing. It is ironic then, that perhaps the most famous of fist-lines in English literature belongs to Jane Austen. The pressure of cutting through the white of silence means we are all wont to disappoint ourselves; our voices all too squeaky and hollow as we write into a void. A novelist has the enviable ability to flit though time; construction a beginning only one an end is comfortably in place, so that an opening line may rest upon what follows it. A diarist has less of the godlike in him, and must be obsequious to the same forward march as his readers. Although, perhaps less god leaves space for more human.
Yet the question resounds, why 'blog'? It seems impossible to call self-publication anything other than supreme arrogance. By bypassing the judgement of publishers, and diminishing the actual necessity of readers and their money, you are bypassing all external judgement and proclaiming your own thought as valuable enough to spew onto a stage straining under the weight of actors, with no quality control. And so here I pledge to offer no guarantee of worth; merely my own curiosity to see whether I can spark interest in others. I also offer no promise of candid honesty, for trifling things like facts and events are merely shackles on truth. A fiction writer collects the flotsam and Jetsam of thoughts in an attempt to uncover the currents that move them, and that is a freedom a should like to have recourse to. Of course, I plan for this to be, in the main, a journal.

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