&greymullet;

Jesus Saves

Jesus Saves! (and uses Abiword, apparently)
Click through for the full picture.

Happy Easter :-p

On Writing, Familiarity, and Occasional Softening of the Absurd Linguistic Jingoism

…in which Ollie talks about perpetually broken promises, bad writing habits and the dangers of a short attention span, [1] and makes a rare concession to the butchering of the English language by letting an awful Americanism pass his lips (or rather his fingers).

“I’ll write more soon, I promise!” is the perpetual cry of the third-rate blogger. Maybe throw a “lol” or two in there for good measure. I’ve certainly said it once. Or twice, perhaps. I may even turn those last two sentence fragments into links, if I ever upload the archives containing the last few incarnations of this site -that’s something that I’ve promised before, too. It’s currently the plan, though, to write more in the new year; after the 4th of January my thesis’ll be in [2] and I’ll go back to being what one of Sam’s former lecturers referred to as “graduate dole scum,” while I try to find someone who’ll pay me to investigate solvent effects for three years. That period of nothingness [3] (the search, not the PhD) should provide ample time, boredom, and frustration for me to clog up the inter-tubes with carefully placed letters.

One thing that’s become all too apparent while writing my thesis is that I write at least as much to learn as I do to explain. That’s rather wonderful when I’m waffling along on here about political reform – I find the background reading (and the subsequent writing) almost as enjoyable as I’m sure you find reading the output. [4] On the other hand, it’s maybe not such a wonderful habit when I’m trying to write about a year’s research that I’ve done and, true to form, summarise relentlessly, taking for granted the things that I know and failing to go into enough detail on the basics. In contrast, once when I get onto a tangent and start to write about something where I’ve a little less solid background, I’m so easily caught up in the thrill of learning something new that I’ll waffle on for page after page.

I hope to be doing fun, new, exciting things in January. If I can count getting my French back to the standard it was at when I was 15 as “new.” Or “fun.” Hopefully I’ll be able to translate some of that excitement into writing. And hopefully, before then, I’ll spend a little more time thinking about why the things that I take for granted excited me in the first place.

Oh, and Merry Christmas, of course. Or Happy Holidays if you’re American.



[1] I managed to type “the dangers of a shirt attention span,” which, as well as being one letter off what I meant to write, also manages to be one letter away from another word that would have been equally true. Or maybe it just refers to the ease with which I get distracted by people’s clothes.

[2] Also, after the 4th of January VAT will be at 20%, though I sincerely hope that those two facts aren’t related.

[3] An interchemium?

[4] Probably more so, to be honest.