Blogging as vanity/touting for business

A colleague at work mentioned the other day that he had been reading my blog, and had I ever contemplated writing for a living? By which I presumed that he meant he enjoyed my writing style, rather than him thinking I was an incompetent developer and should quit the day job.

I pressed him on this issue, and sure enough, it turns out that was what he meant. Good.

Well as I have mentioned before, I have always wanted to be a writer ever since I was a child. I used to write short stories regularly for my own entertainment, and indeed even turned my hand to (may I be forgiven for my sins) poetry once or twice. However, that paled when I realised that most of the stuff I wrote had an audience of one. Or two if my mother read it. I have probably written about six or seven short stories in the last ten years. But don't worry, I'm not going to start sticking them on here.

And that was about it. I attended a couple of creative writing classes at Gateshead college. I can't say I learned much to be honest, but I enjoyed the fact that I was forced to write every week to have something to read out the next week.

On the other hand, you had to sit around with a group of people, only half of whom could be bothered, and one of whom didn't attend after the first two weeks because he had misunderstood what the course was for, and thought it was a course to teach English to non-native speakers. Understandable really: after all if you don't know the language well enough to know which course you're signing up for, you probably do want to improve your grasp of it.

And then this blog came along. Blogs by their very nature are a form of vanity publishing. I'm paying for the webspace, I'm spending my time writing it without gaining anything in return, and it's entirely up to the visitors whether or not they want to read it. Which is why people can (and do) post any old nonsense on there. Still, people will read any old nonsense, so that's ok. Indeed I have had more than one person say thet are a fan. Which I guess is one of the things that keeps me blogging.

Although if no-one read my site, and no-one seemed interested in what I have to say, then I still don't know whether or not I'd stop. I enjoy writing it too much, and I enjoy being able to see it 'out there' on the web.

So, in short, thanks for reading. If you want to leave comments telling me how wonderful I am and how you don't know how you'd cope without my blog, that would of course be fine. Alternatively, if there is anyone out there who likes my writing style sufficiently to want me to write something for them, I'd be even more interested!