first post.

Hello and welcome.

After spending the best part of 90 minutes customising the appearance of this thing and filling in the profile section (what a glorious opportunity to make myself seem more interesting than I am) I now find myself lost for words, or at least unsure where to begin. I suppose explaining the existence of this blog would be as good a place as any, since it feels somewhat indulgent to expect that anyone would be interested in the self-publishing ramblings of yet another disgruntled twenty-something. So, here goes.

Since leaving university last summer (graduating, not leaving, I should say - I did actually finish, despite the fact I have a job that requires no qualifications and frequently involves cleaning up things one would rather never have to see, never mind get close to) my writing output has been rather pathetic. Aside from my CD reviews (for this site) and various personal correspondences, I never write anything. This from the girl who always said it wouldn't matter if she failed to find a career as she only wanted to be a novelist.

The central problem being that I hate everything I write - I even hate this sentence, and I haven't finished it yet. Yet at the same time my manic ego prevents redrafting or asking for advice (a tumour on the side of this very problem is my enormous dislike of most amateur writing, even most amateur writers and cannot bear to be a part of that scene. There, I said it, you may now spam this journal with anonymous comments of bile and hatred. Let me explain - a large proportion of amatuer writers are entirely talentless, influenced solely by chick-lit and bestseller lists, without interesting life experiences, unique perspective or anything important to say. They generally aspire towards a bland, overly-desciptive style packed with paint-by-numbers "emotion" and characters it is impossible to have any interest in besides hoping that they get killed off. Thus, I am sick of sharing stylised pieces of work with other "writers" only to be told I need to "tidy up" the grammar and add more desciption. Once you know the rules, you can break them - these people are living under the rules, not above them, and thus in bringing each other up they can only bring me down); and the end result is that nothing gets written. I don't want to end up fifty and still in social care, and if an online journal gets me writing publicly about anything it can only be a "good thing", even if I offend a few people along the way and end up writing for a non-existent audience.

Don't be expecting updates of a personal type here - I won't be telling you what I had for breakfast or how my day at work was. I will give my opinion on curent events, music, books and films, and there will be more than the occasional rant. All of this assuming, of course, that I don't give up this project almost as soon as I've begun, as I am wont to do.