Happy New Blog
As I pick the crumbs from the last mince pie (best before date: yesterday) from between the keys, the prescience of my dashed-down remarks from way back (see “Thoughts” on main site and “About” here) hits home – a whole month has indeed seemingly gone by untroubled by any new or interesting thoughts from my head.
I can’t help feeling this is going to be something of an obstacle to generating regular readers. Although to be honest, I’m not sure what the idea of regular readers actually is, I’m assuming that there’s £££ in it somewhere, somehow (ads? work offers?). P’raps it’ll turn out just to be for shits and giggles, as they say.
Anyway, in a way much akin to novels about authors with writer’s block, I imagine there must always the danger that blogs about the difficulty of deciding what to blog about will ultimately take the nimblest of U-turns somewhere none-too-distant from the perineum, and disappear to where the sun rarely shines.
And yet I am not utterly bereft of ideas.
Item 1. Let me be frank. I would like a few more customers, purely for a safety-in-numbers element and to minimise the potential disaster of having too many eggs in too few baskets.
Item 2. I recently completed a contracts module of an MA in Legal Translation (City University) where I received the confirmation I was hoping for, that my contract translation is well up there in the mustard cutting stakes (too immodest? Tough. In theory at least, I’m good at it).
And so I thought about maybe blogging about the happy juxtaposition of the above, the diary of one man’s quest to become England’s Finest Translator of Contracts for the Sale of Goods and Services. But if I fail, I’ll look an utter chump, and if I succeed, I’ll look an vainglorious bastard, and while, like many of us, I have my moments of both, I’m not sure I want to make a bloody parade out of it all, despite any vicarious benefit there may be to any readers. And if, as is most likely, I hit some kind of outcome that is neither fish nor fowl, it will probably fall between every imaginable stool.
The fact is, I’m much better at responding to other people’s comments on events, as my activity on Proz or Stridonium demonstrates. Even the final push to set up this blog was provided by my wish to comment on someone else’s thoughts (and, if I’m honest, comments I suspected might not get approved). But I don’t like that either, because it looks as though one is trying to draw traffic away from the site of the original comment, and I think that is an undesirable trait or effect.
So I can only live in hope that one day, I’ll have the spark it takes to whip up something like this excellent stuff from Rose Newell. See, if I had had an experience of that kind (agency application then bewildering email), I’d be spectacularly “meh” about the whole thing. And I’m not sure that “meh” and blogging are compatible.