Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Pay No Attention To That Man Behind The Curtain

I’ve noticed something over the last few weeks as I’ve been conducting this little experiment in daily blogging. Unwittingly, I have been dividing my working day into four distinct chunks:

1. Actual work – the stuff I get paid to do. Suckers…
2. Job hunting – trawling through job sites, dealing with phone calls and e-mails, sifting through Employment Agency Obfuscation & Bullshit.
3. General webfuckery – going through my RSS feeds, news sites, random bouncing around online.
4. Blogging

I rarely take a proper lunch-break so, for the sake of argument, let’s call the working day a huge wedge of time that starts just after 9am (because I am pathologically incapable of arriving at work on time. I usually get here at 9.15am) and ends in the vicinity of 5.30pm.

Parkinson's Law states that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." Ain’t that the truth. And I notice that I don’t get around to the blogging section of the day until somewhere between 3 and 5pm. Then I get a small rush of The Fear as I realise that I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to write about. So I do some mental free-association and allow my ideaspace to become polluted by anything that drifts lazily across my mind. Then the Muse pops in for an afternoon chat.

I permit myself to be momentarily assaulted by the tyranny of the White Page before I start tapping the keys. And then it just starts coming out. Sometimes it’s a painful trickle. Sometimes it’s an unstoppable torrent. But there’s always something. It’s like pissing with words.

It feels like a bit of a cheat to write a blog entry about how I write a blog entry. But as we are now well into the final week of my blog-a-day foolishness, I thought a peek into the process might be useful. Sometimes the Man Behind The Curtain really is The Wizard of Oz. And sometimes he’s just a guy who accidentally crashed his hot air balloon in a wonderful place.

I don’t really know what that means either. I just like the sound of it.

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