Big Bad Blog

To cook a fine meal takes love and care and even then it doesn’t always come out right, to sew a pair of curtains is quite straight forward, but you need care and concentration or you will make a mess. It’s the same with a blog.

My blog spiel at the top there says this is my take on life as a writer, a mother a wife and a lecturer. I thought it would be boring to exclusively blog about writing, which is basically just pressing buttons on a keyboard, in the right order, the sort of order that can be often impossible to find and on occasion makes me feel a bit like I’m Leonard Cohen writing Hallelujah!

As for writing about being a mother and wife, well that’s just reflections on my family life. Most of all I like my blog posts to be topical, I also like them to be positive and ideally of some interest to others. Therefore I was thrilled last week to have dredged up something positive to say about the election results and consequently to blog about.

You can read the mess I made of it here.

And this is where I think I went wrong.

I hurried.

I have set myself the target of posting every Tuesday and I left it rather last minute to write the post. Remember when Ed Milliband set himself a target of not using notes? He made a mess of it too.

I added too many ingredients.

At the time I was pleased to have included the following culturally significant references in the post:

Jazz, Rock and Roll, Glam Rock, Punk, Disco, Country, German Expressionism, The Bauhaus, Franz Kafka, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, Picasso, Martin Scorsese movies.
And demonstrate my broad understanding of world events; The Great War, The Deep Depression and the rise of Fascism.

I made a literary bad.

I know the dust bowl was in Oklahoma, I remember the men kicking it with their feet and going in doors again muttering. But the land of milk and honey; California was so strong in my mind, perhaps because of the current drought, perhaps because it was for the Joad family so full of promise, that I put the turtle there and made myself look like an idiot.

The message was lost.

There was such a tangle of ideas that my overall message was lost. It was not clear if I were saying the Tories were the villains (which I am) or Labour was (because they were in during the seventies). My big idea, the one that gave me some level of pleasure to put together; that there may be a significant cultural movement coming our way. Well that was lost.

So I suppose it’s a bit like cooking a meal, plan ahead, do your research, carefully select your ingredients, take it slow, and check the seasoning.  If you have any other suggestions as to how I can better the blog please leave a comment.

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