Obviating The Apoplects

According to the wonderfulness of the world wide interweb, blog etiquette – and by etiquette I mean tricks you can perform to get more readers engaged – dictates that a blog post should end with a question.

There was probably a point to that opening paragraph but then I got distracted by two things.

Firstly, the idea of a blog dictating something conjured up images of a whole bunch of words clustering together to form a likeness of Hitler strutting rage-filled and jack-booted across my perfect word-free (undoubtedly white, possibly blond-haired and blue-eyed) page spouting propaganda.

Secondly, I got to wondering if it would be simpler to just read the last line of every post in a cliched Australian accent so that a question would be implied? Thereby obviating the need to pose an actual question.

I knew I shouldn’t have written that down because now I’m wondering at what point I underwent the grammatical reassignment surgery that bypassed my natural instinct to say removing and instead plump for thereby obviating.

Then I just got fed up with trying to convince my word processor that it was perfectly OK not to capitalise thereby despite it coming straight after a question mark and accepted defeat.

Am I allowed to call it a word processor any more or does that render me a dinosaur? It’s probably accurate – it takes perfectly innocent words and then munges them up into something almost word-like in the way that processed cheese is almost cheese-like. I should probably give it a cool acronym like WRA (Word Representation App) and then say it as a word so it sounds more like WWROOOOAAAARRR.

Maybe the company logo could be a lion or something.

I’ve remembered the question now – although I’m still not sure if it should be at the start, the end or with an Australian bias.

My question was about whether or not I’m the only writer in the world who wonders occasionally if they really want to be a writer (insert question mark if it makes you happy).

Maybe I’m just seeing one side of things – kind of like the fact that people find it easier to criticise a restaurant than to praise it – but I seem to be constantly hearing about people who thrapped out a million words over their cornflakes and their only challenge is around how they can possibly slow down their output and find time to edit because they live and breathe their characters and are practically apoplectic with rage when they have to spend more than five nanoseconds in the real world.

And breathe.

What a rollercoaster. We’ve gone from the leafy suburbs of thereby obviating through to the shanty towns of kind of like and thrapped only to be rescued by the raging apoplects of justice.

Anyway. For the record. Almost every word I’ve ground out over the years has been difficult. When I write my novel one day I want it to feel like most of my time spent running – fucking long, fucking difficult and devoid of any discernible purpose.

Bollocks. Now I’m thinking about a discernible porpoise.

Five hundred words.

No actual point.

Eat my dust novel writing losers.