Still blogging along . . .

I am so new to this blogging game that I hadn't realised how much I didn't know about it all until I started looking at http://dummies-guide-to-google-blogger.blogspot.com/ and some similar 'how to' pages late last night.

More than a month since I started Musing from the Muddy Island, I'm still a little surprised that I started a blog at all! That I did so ran entirely contrary to my previous views on the subject (a sort of grumpy 'who do these self-obsessed, self-publicising, self-just-about-everything people think they are, assuming that anyone's going to be interested in them and their opinions? hurrumph' - was the general drift).

But I found that I was increasingly using my main website - which I wanted to keep essentially as a 'professional' window on who I am and what I do in the world of book and art publishing - as a parking space for small bits of personal news, Mersea Island news, poems, youtube clips, etc etc etc. A blog seemed more suited to such oddments. So I signed up and then felt far too shy to write anything at all for days and days. But now I seem to have got going. I don't think that this blog has yet achieved a very distinctive character or 'feel' of its own, but I am quite enjoying the randomness of it all, actually.

Giving substance to inconsequential thoughts, while allowing bigger, more difficult thoughts somehow to float out into the ether disguised as fluff and nonsense. Looking inward, reaching out. Sharing thoughts, ideas, images, places; acknowledging people and things that influence me; having little snippets of 'conversation' with unknown visitors . . . it's all surprisingly stimulating and already I think I would miss it if I had to stop.

Oh dear, it seems as though I have been comprehensively seduced. Possibly by the sound of my own voice. Which is almost certainly A Bad Thing.

Inspired by my brief mention of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach a couple of days ago, brand new blogger, Julian Roskams was kind enough to send me his own (considerably more extended and articulate) thoughts on the novel. I suggested that he should post it on his blog, and he did, and you can read it at http://eticapress.blogspot.com/ . I fear that I am going to have to re-read the book before I am able to come up with anything half so eloquent.

Thanks for the tip about html links, Julian. I've wrestled and struggled but I still can't get them to work. Och well . . .