Words, words, words

I have misgivings about this whole blog thing. I mean, why does someone blog?

Being afflicted sorely by a cultural trait known as North East reticence, it strikes me as a foully egotistical thing to do. It assumes that somewhere out in the ether there is a reader, perhaps haplessly blundering onto one's blog from a random Google search, casting their eyes down the page and exclaiming 'Jesus God, what shite!' and swiftly hitting their 'back' button in the hope of sourcing something useful instead. Surely it'd be better (and more self-effacing) to jot the guff down in a wee diary, tucked neatly away at the back of a drawer?
Hmmm. Diaries and suchlike things are all very well, but require discipline on the part of the diarist... miss a day and it's glaringly obvious, as when you return next day, you're faced with a frightening expanse of blank white page. It's a dramatic reminder of your inadequacy... your laziness... your dullness... your lack of anything interesting to report. Well, that's what the blank page does to me, anyway. You see, I'm positively phobic about that white unfilled space; once upon a time I'd write joyfully and easily, covering a sheet of A4 in a flash. Then, sadly, a few years back, I woke up one morning and found that words wouldn't come anymore. This was a bit unfortunate, considering I was in the middle of a thesis at the time. O aye, the ideas were there right enough, but getting them out and onto paper became well-nigh impossible. (We're talking here three hours of trying to produce a single, solitary sentence. Hell's bells and hurlies, as my granny used to say). Months passed, and there was no change. The paltry paragraphs I managed to produce were dire, in my eyes, despite the hours of agonising over each word and punctuation mark. What to do? Give it up as a bad mistake? Well, no, not quite. I struggled on, for more than a year, missing deadlines for chapters and sobbing excuses at my supervisor; I read more self-help books on writer's block than you could shake a stick at, trying all the techniques under the sun to cure it, and still that bloody white page gleamed pristinely up at me. Och, said I, it's just the thesis. Do something else for a while, and eventually it'll come back. Eight years later: sod all. Even a 350 word book review is beyond me now. Tyach!

So then (hauling myself back from that tangent onto the original topic at hand), why blog? Well, maybe it's a last ditch attempt to get back in the habit of writing. At least here, the page is already besmirched with text, and unlike a diary, if I can't be arsed for weeks at a time, there won't be that physical symbol of my tardiness in the form of empty white leaves. Additionally, it's ostensibly a public thing (no matter that it'd be highly unlikely that anyone actually found it and read it) and therefore is potentially subject to the judgement and criticism that I fear has been the cause of the block in the first place. Even the slimmest chance of the eyes of another perusing my clumsy prose might be enough to fix my paranoia that what I produce will be judged and found wanting. I doubt it, actually, but ah've tried aathin else.