I got excited about making an “author platform”, set this whole blog up and forgot about it. Oh pants. Sorry. This is the curse of blogs. You look down for a moment, then back up, then a year and a half has gone posting nothing more. But I will try again.

An image of a man outside a pub with a book
And now AI generated images are a thing. I bet that doesn’t getting annoying quickly!

In my fiction, I am striving to write and rewrite every word, paragraph, and scene, to the best of my ability. If I do that with blogging, I would have time to blog, which is what has happened: quod erat demonstrandum.

Someone said to me Ezra - you got to stop overthinking it, just type some crap and throw it over the wall. Right, so here we are, at the gates of hell, where it’s written: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

I don’t even understand the first three posts. It was part of a series (presumably?) leading somewhere, but I never wrote enough to get there, and I have long forgotten what the destination was. I would dig out the laptop I used a year and a half ago and figure it out, but it’s in a another country. So the mystery must remain.

I realise I have a kind of imposter syndrome: people might judge my (eventually?) forthcoming books by the fast typed nonsense I have written here. Even though it is a different medium. In fiction, I can spend an hour on a key 50 words, yet I wrote this 1500+ word post in around an hour. So that’s thirty times faster.

To be inspire me to write here, it needs a dialogue, not a one-way street. I never got around to adding the comments and backlinks system. So the lack of engagement, which was my fault, made me give up. Although, would I have ever gotten any replies if I had bothered to make the comments system?

I’m not sure. There are so many blogs today. I’m sure in the late 1990s, people were so excited to go online for the first time, they would read any old junk. However, in this era, the content to eyeball ratio is different. And now we have AIs assisting the flood of text.

Also, we have social media which is more immediate, except in my case. I set up Facebook in the same burst of enthusiasm when started this blog and to be honest I haven’t been back since. I will. So go follow me on Facebook so I have a warm welcome when I arrive.

Mr Beast said about YouTube, make a hundred videos, then you will master it. I made two YouTube videos, about me trying to think of something to tweet, and then stopped doing that. Phew, no risk of being successful there either.

It’s a firm belief I have developed that renaming pubs should be illegal. Everything wrong with modern civilisation (or lack thereof) is a jumped up oik coming into a little money, through selling Bitcoin or some other nonsense, then buying a historic pub and ignoring the 300-year-old local history and calling it something trendy, the Jolly Roger becomes Ethereum Place, and the Dog and Duck becomes Litecoin Hotel.

Does the same rule apply to social networks? Not sure, because to be fair, Twitter was a dumb name all along. How do we say X? I tried calling it ex, but it just sounds like a lover you want to avoid. Maybe Elon Musk doesn’t have exes. He seems to operate billionaire polygamy, where the women rotate around with their hands out for money, and they make him a biannual child in return. Whom I am to judge? That’s pretty much what the kings did in the Old Testament, and God loved them.

An image showing a man with arm full of dollars in front of queing women and prams
Hello my latest child, I’ll name you E=mc²

Maybe we call it cross, because everyone on there is always cross. To get the cross algorithm to love you, they make many insightful posts every day and keep a laser focus on one topic, but I have nothing insightful to say and struggle with focus. Or you can just be cross at people and argue to drive engagement. But, I find it difficult to be cross with anyone in the writing community (but myself). Everyone is nice, and I learn a lot from them.

Most people are cross on X about politics, but politics operates at a different timescale to writing. How many presidents and Prime Ministers will GRRM’s “Song of Ice and Fire Series” pass by? He started writing that under George Bush Senior.

Politicians deal with the side effects of technology and culture. Humanity forgets them. The Hobbit came out in 1937. I can tell you a lot about it. Politics in 1937, not so much. Who was the Prime Minister? I am guessing Neville Chamberlain. Google says… correct. Who were in his cabinet? I do not know. I know in the more famous year 1939 that Halifax, Churchill and Eden were around. Google says.. two out of three. Technically, two out of twenty, since there are a load of guys I have never heard of, and can’t even remember now one minute after looking at the page.

Let’s make it older. I know Herman Melville published Moby-Dick in 1851. Who was the PM? Couldn’t tell you if you put a gun to my head. Wikipedia says… Lord John Russell. I know a bit about the Corn Laws debate (but that’s not 1851). What were the political debates people were screaming about? Wikipedia says the biggest row of the year was over the Ecclesiastical Titles Act 1851, which was repealed anyway in 1871. Something to do with who gets to call themselves a bishop.

Older still. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is one of my favourite fantasy works. It came out in 1595. Who was running England? I know Elizabeth I was Queen as she was one of Shakespeare’s benefactors. Who was the political leader? Wikipedia says… William Cecil. Nice. What was the biggest political issue of 1595? The Raid on Mount’s Bay. Did you know that? Don’t lie to me.

Who was the American President? Trick question, no one. Although I am sure someone you don’t know that. Wikipedia says England had stuck a flag on the beach in California on 1579 and claimed it for England, but were busy elsewhere in 1595. The Spanish had free rein at this point and were busy clearing out the natives, later Britain took it from the Spanish. Later, the Americans declared independence after the British parliament abolished slavery. Later, after the American civil war, they retconned the first war to be about taxes on tea.

Maybe that is a statement that will make people cross at me on Twitter/X and drive the engagement, except everyone gave up five paragraphs ago. At least that was a long diversion. We are blogging with gas now. How to do blogging/social media advice seem to boil down to the ten thousand hour rule: “the key to achieving true expertise in any skill is a matter of practicing, albeit in the correct way, for at least 10,000 hours.”

Pants, I bet there are people out there with 10,000 blog posts. Oh well, four down. 9996 to go.

The author’s version of this rule came long before any of the others. I have heard it attributed to several authors, but it escapes me who. When I google it, everyone on the first page of results attributes it to Neil Gaiman, but I think it’s much older, but that might require going to the second page of results and who does that?

We have all read Neil Gaiman, but not Ernest Hemingway or whatever. I’m sure Neil Gaiman has read Ernest Hemingway, but he was born in 1960 so has culture in his brain, and had nothing else to do in the pre-internet period. As opposed to us modern kids who are just flesh interfaces for an electronic networks and databases, and we cannot speak a full paragraph without double checking something on Wikipedia.

Anyway, regardless of who said it, the concept is that as a writer you have a million bad words inside, and that once those million bad words are gone, you write something worth reading.

I wrote over a million words of a fantasy series. My problem is not that it’s bad. I haven’t yet summoned the energy and time to edit even the first novel into a publishable state. It’s very draining being original, because you have to introduce the world using fast-paced but not boring action. In the 21st century, you can’t just spend twenty pages in the preface explaining how the world works, as Tolkien and his peers could back in the day.

Tolkien spent twenty years editing each book, and I might not be any faster. His main magnum opus, The Silmarillion, was unfinished in his lifetime. He just died and left it to his son to sort out. This might be my plan. Except I forgot to have a son, and no one has seemed very keen on making me one. However, if I ever get one, I am naming him Christopher and leaving him all my unpublished stories to edit for me.

So, being exhausted by editing my fantasy fiction, I put it down and took a break to write a quick short story set in a non-epic, straightforward modern setting, which soon expanded into a more epic story of over a million words. I took a break and wrote science fiction. I might need several Christophers, one for each genre. Maybe Elon’s billionaire polygamy isn’t such a bad idea. I just need to become a billionaire.. Slight problem, I’m afraid if I can’t figure out how to enable comments, inventing an electric car is beyond me. Perhaps I should have gotten into that bitcoin thing. At least I’d own a pub. No offence, ladies, but I’d rather have a pub than a harem.

I have more to say about this. But that’s enough for one post. I’m going to google how to get back into my blog system. Leave me a response on Twitter, or Facebook, or don’t. Maybe leave one in 18 months that will confuse me.

A fantasy image of a tree under water
This would fit into my fantasy world. AI images are good, if you don’t ask them to draw faces.