While I was deep in my filestore yesterday, something like D:\My Documents\incoming\old_big_disk\My Documents\archive\old_c\linux files\home\sweavo\windows_files\backup\website\current.old\public_html or something, I found my first ever blog entry. It was just a page of HTML because they hadn’t invented blogs yet.

It stated that I started my website in order to practise writing. To an extent it’s been very good for that, though blogging is a journey in itself as you discover that you don’t like people reading parts of something that you’ve voluntarily made public.

What I didn’t make explicit in that post, probably because I didn’t understand it at the time, is that there are two types of writing I want to do. The first is simply to make it easier for me to write technical words for humans, and that has been an unqualified success. The second is to get me writing fiction, and in this regard, it has been far too little.

Writing fiction is a LOT more work than writing fact, if the facts are already known. Facts have a pleasing tendency to hang together coherently without contradicting one another, so you straighten out your facts, spread ‘em out on the table, divide up the space into coherent chunks, and get writing. Fiction however seems to me to be about retro-fitting made-up facts to get the effect you want. Organising thoughts and writing them clearly is a vital part, but a very small part, of the process of writing fiction.

I’m thinking the ’short story a month’ idea of Mongers’ would be nice to do, but I don’t think I’ve even got the time/commitment/organisation/discipline to manage that with any level of complexity.

So be warned, there may be stories coming your way, and they WILL be rubbish.