The World of Sherby57

Because I’m worth it

Knowing What To Write

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Sometimes it’s necessary to start typing before you know what you’re going to say.  This can be tricky.  If you don’t know what you’re going to say, then how do you know what you’re going to say?  As I say, it can be tricky.

One option it to simply pick a random word from the dictionary and then go through the dictionary again to find the most appropriate word to follow the first word that you picked.  Then repeat.  And repeat again.  In fact, keep repeating that until you find that you’ve written an entire blog post.

That’s the technique that I’ve been using to type this post.  It’s been pretty successful hasn’t it?  It’s been pretty long-winded, though, to be honest.  Even getting to this point has taken me 11 years.  It takes me about a month to go through the dictionary each time.  Even explaining that bit about how long it takes to read through the dictionary – and then this bit explaining that – has added a whopping 3 years to my quest.  You’ve got to admit that it was pretty foresighted of me to have started this so long before I actually had a blog.

Anyway, I’ll stop now.  I’ve wasted enough of my life on this post.  Hello world, here I come!

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Turgid Prose

You start with an idea.  The idea grows into a feeling.  The feeling transforms into words.  The words tell a story.  The story enriches our lives.

Alternatively, you don’t start with an idea.  The non-idea occupies the vacuum of your brain.  Like a kind of mind-alchemy, the absence of anything is in itself a word-generator.  How this happens nobody knows.  Sometimes this is successful.  On other occasions, something like the following happens:

The hairy lizard sat patiently on the step.  He knew that if he waited long enough that the woman would drop one of her crumpets.  The hairy lizard loved crumpets.  He was quite the unusual lizard.

His love affair with crumpets began in 1989 when he was living in Wolverhampton.  He’d only ever been used to people having toast for breakfast previously, so didn’t know what to make of the circular treats.  If he had been human he would have asked what they were, but he wasn’t.  He was a lizard.  So, he just ate it.  He bloody loved it.

Why would such a thing happen?  Could a lizard really love crumpets?  It seems exceptionally unlikely, but is this really a problem?  Surely it is the function of fiction to challenge our expectations.  Or is it just that I wrote a post that I wasn’t happy with?

Oh god.  You get to a point where you’re 200 words into a post and you hate it, but you’ve written too much to give up. What happens in this situation?  Maybe you write a tedious framing device for that post, which in turn bores you to tears.  Yet you’ve invested more time in the post, so you feel even more compelled to plough on regardless.  You then search around aimlessly for a way to end this piece of turgid prose.

As Oliver sang, “Where is love?”

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Being Back – My Song

I’ve been away soooo long (I’m singing so you’ll have to imagine my tuneful voice).

Did you miss me? Did you know that I’d gone? (Don’t sing the bit in brackets, they’re a whisper in your head)

It’s only been four days, since we last spoke.

But those eternal hours that passed.

Have left me shattered like some glass.

And, in a way, it’s not so nice.

It’s like my hair is full of lice.

Only not really.

Oh no!

Woooooah no!

Baby.

Not really.

Erm, that’s the end of my song.  I hope it properly summed up the emotion of me not having posted for four days.  If you want to nominate me for a Ivor Novello award, you’d probably be quite correct.

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Will I Make It?

There’s only 29 minutes left in the day. I’m on my phone. The battery is well in the red. I’m tired. I’ve got no ideas. I’ve got nothing to say.

Will I be able to write a blog post today or not? If I can think of an idea, will I be able to post it before my battery runs out. Will I be able to do it before I fall asleep?

Clearly, yes. You’re reading it. You didn’t really think it through when you said no, did you?

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This Post is Faulty

Hang on. I’ll be with you in a second.

Sorry about that.

No, it’s gone again. Bear with me.

Has anybody got a spare blog-driver? No? Drat and double drat.

Can you hear that buzzing? You can? Damn, I thought I’d fixed it. I hate it when blog posts go awry.

I think I’m going to have to get a professional bloganic in to take a look. I’m really sorry about this. It’s quite embarrassing.

Better luck next time, eh?

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