Versatile Blogger Award

Blogging can be hard work. Not in the same way that digging holes is hard work, but nevertheless, there’s a lot of effort involved – coming up with inspiration, turning that into something coherent, remembering how to spell words like ‘coherent’. Add to that the dark, crushing realisation that around half your readers are Russian spambots, and it’s amazing any blogs ever get written.

(The easiest way to help your favourite blogger to overcome this is to leave comments and hit the ‘Like’ button. Russian spambots don’t do that, at least not legibly.)

All which is just preamble to me passing on my thanks to Heather over at HeatherBlog for nominating me for a Versatile Blogger Award. It genuinely means a lot, especially as it comes from a better writer than me. It’s been a long time since I got nomimated for anything related to my writing (the last time was at High School – I misunderstood the comptetion’s submission guidance and so was forced to enter something I’d written out-of-spec, much to the disgust of my teacher. Of course, the Universal Law Of Irony meant that I was the only person in school who actually won anything).

However, a Versatile Blogger nomination carries with it responsibility. Firstly you have the opportunity to nominate some of your own favourite bloggers, which I’ll do in due course. Then you have to list seven interesting facts about yourself.

This is a lot easier if you actually have seven interesting facts:

1.  I can recite much of Transformers: The Movie off by heart. And when I say ‘can’, I mean ‘do’.

2.  Talking of movies, I cry at them, especially The Iron Giant and Finding Neverland. I also believe that Steve McQueen will one day make it over that fence in The Great Escape, despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

3.  My favourite city is Toronto. I promise to take my fiancee there one day.

4.  My favourite song is Thunder Road, but my favourite hymn is Be Thou My Vision.

5. I’m not a good driver.

6. My karaoke song is Born to Run.

7.  I almost quit this blog a couple of months ago because I didn’t think it would achieve critical mass. I’m glad I didn’t, and I guess that’s the moral of this post; don’t give up and never forget to give encouragement whenever you can. You never know when it’s really, really needed…

Search Engine Disoptimisation for Beginners (No, I’m not a spambot)

Anyone who writes a blog is vaguely egocentric. Sorry but it’s true; we write this stuff hoping that someone reads it. Of course we do; that’s why we love the concepts of citizen journalism and user generated content and people getting over-emotional on Youtube.

So if I wasn’t a Methodist, and if I were a hard-drinkin’ gambling man with whiskey on my breath and a rattlesnake on my shoulder, I’d be willing to bet that most people blogging here check out their statistics and analytics on a daily basis. I know I do, but that might just be the insecurities of a man without a huge readership.

Anyway, I was checking out search terms that have sent people to my blog, and some of the results are, well, surprising. Some make perfect sense – people are interested in photos from Kapow Comic Con (a specific photo I don’t have, so anyone interested should go here), and I get a bit of traffic as the result of a tribute to Jon Pertwee I wrote. All this makes sense – after all, this is a fairly geeky blog when all is said and done.

However, it gets odder, although that probably says more about the blog than anything else. For instance, I can only assume I’ve achieved some sort of Search Engine Optimisation when it comes to the lyrics for ‘I am the Music Man’; that’s thanks to this post, which is understandable enough; I just can’t believe so many people want the lyrics to ‘I am the Music Man’. Has it been covered by Metallica or Johnny Cash or someone?

Actually, writing all that just makes me aware of how disappointing my blog must be – it never answers any of the questions put to it by Google. I feel a bit bad about that. That said, I like the idea that I can be inadvertantly educational – someone was looking for a definition of ‘yihkes’, which I assume was a typo for ‘yikes’ but which instead took them to a post on the ANARE Code. Wonder if that came as a surprise or not.

This is before we get on to the religious side of the blog. My favourite pieces of Christian writing here are my reflections on Easter, Good Friday and Christmas. Do they get the traffic? They do not. Instead I become a go-to blog for posts about the End of the World. Flattering? Well, yeah. Cheerful? Heck no!

But finally, my favourite search engine term that took someone to a post of mine is…

*Synthesized drumroll to build the tension*

“Hitler in 3D”

Bet someone was really disappointed…

Writer’s Block and how to overcome it through the medium of whining

I may have Writer’s Block.

I try to be disciplined with this blog, aiming to write at least one post every couple of days. It doesn’t always work out like that but the intention is there, and besides, I’ve normally got a few ideas buzzing around my cotton-wool brain. The last few days… Well, I’ve been struggling.

Thinking about it, saying I’ve got Writer’s Block sounds a little grand, conjuring up images of a scrawny man in spectacles, emaciated and be-mittened and hunched over an ancient typewriter illuminated only by candlelight. I’m not at that place yet, probably because I’m not a paid author and no-one’s going to cut off my electricity if I can’t come up with a post on Detective Chimp or something. My Writer’s Block lacks anything in the way of Epic.

Maybe I should call it Blogger’s Block, but that would be lame as it a) implies bloggers aren’t real writers, which isn’t true, and b) sounds like something colonic which can be cured by eating a bit more fibre. I’m assuming that’s not true, but insert your own joke about verbal diarrhea at your convenience.

I also feel bad about confessing to all this because I remember Terry Pratchett saying that you soon stop complaining about Writer’s Block when you have an angry newspaper editor screaming at you, and in a strange way that strips me of my working class authenticity.

Ironically I’ve just written a whole post on not having anything to write about, and now I’m second guessing it all because it feels self-indulgent. I’d seek professional help, but then I think about all the great artists, and while yes, they were all crazy, they wouldn’t have struggled to fill a blog. Blake claimed to communicate with angels, he’d've at least got a couple of Tweets out of that.

I’m going to go cut my lawn. Maybe that will help.

At least I haven’t stooped to filling a post by babbling about not having a cure for Writer’s…

Oh, biscuits.

Pick Up Your Pen

There’s a concept in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics that, somewhere in the halls within which the anthropomorphic personification of dreams resides, there is a library that contains all the books that were never written, including Road Trips to the Emerald City by L. Frank Baum and The Bestselling Romantic Spy Thriller I Used To Think About On The Bus That Would Sell A Billion Copies And Mean I’d Never Have to Work Again by…well, most of us actually.

I love that concept, that somewhere out there is a copy of the book I never wrote. I mean, it was something I always wanted to do, but it got pushed aside once bills had to be paid, and yes, now I’m a blogger and a writer for work, but it’s not the same is it? It’s not the same as seeing something you wrote on someone else’s shelf.

Because books have power, don’t they? We still remember the books we read as children. I recall being a voracious reader as a child, always with my nose in a book, reading as I walked along. My reading has slowed down since then; I blame it on being busy and getting old, but really it’s because I don’t make enough time for it. That’s sad and a shame.

So I guess that’s my plea to anyone out there who wants to do something creative but never gets round to it: just get on with it. Get on with it because you’ll never get any more time and because inspiration won’t strike if you never bother to pick up a pen or a paintbrush. Go ahead and do it – carve that sculpture, compose that symphony, paint that painting, write that book. Use it, don’t lose it.

(I stole “Use it, don’t lose it” from an obscure favourite book of mine, Mid-life Confidential: The Rock Bottom Remainders tour with three chords and an attitude, in which a group of middle-aged writers, including Stephen King, form a rock band and tour America… Which, I guess, is also about seizing opportunities while you’ve got the chance.)

So pick up that pen and write for your life. The readers of the future await you.

Bezalel’s Legacy: The link between my Granddad and an obscure figure from the Bible

That’s a model of my church made by my Granddad. I can’t state this with any great certainty, but I believe he used scrap wood; I have childhood memories of him working on it, and upon its completion he was justifiably proud. Life takes its inevitable course, and now the model has passed into my possession; a memory of my grandparents, of course, but it’s also coming to mean something more.

Both my father and grandfather were carpenters by trade; in contrast I’m an office dweller. I don’t carry on the family tradition of being able to turn pieces of wood into miniture churches, and there’s a part of me that almost regrets breaking that continuity. It’s not a huge regret – I’m the person I am, and that means I work with words and numbers and computers instead – but all the same, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wish I’d inherited those skills.

There’s a guy in the Bible, Bezalel. From what I can tell (and please correct me if I’m wrong), he’s the first person directly said to have been blessed and annointed by the Spirit of God, and here’s the thing: he’s not a prophet or a priest, he’s a craftsman, an artisan. He’s the guy responsible for building and furnishing the Tabernacle, a hugely important job as this was to be the house of God on Earth. It’s a slightly obscure but significant bit of the Bible: God the Creator gives Bezalel the gift of creativity. Like my Dad and Granddad this was a practical, tactile creativity, expressed through wood and stone and metal and fabrics. In a sense Bezalel’s legacy extends to all those craftsmen who came after him, and even to those whose creativity is expressed in less tangible forms – poetry, song, music, story, dance.

I’d like to be able to claim this legacy of creativity, but it can be frustrating sometimes; I’ve been blogging for a long time now and it’s depressing to read my stats page at times, and let’s face it, creativity is one of the first qualities to get buried under the stresses and busyness of day-to-day life.

But looking at that model church reminds me that creativity is important, even if it’s a different creativity to that practiced by your forefathers. Heck, I’ve just remembered that, during his childhood, my Dad was a decent artist, sitting down to draw intricate pictures of birds. I don’t remember him doing that as an adult, and that’s a shame; I guess I don’t want to get to a point in my life where I look back and realise I didn’t write as much as I could. I’m not saying I’m particularly good at it, but it’s something I love.

I guess the last word on this could go to Florence Foster Jenkins, who had a good attitude towards this sort of thing:

“People may say I can’t sing, but no-one can ever say I didn’t sing…”