First Post

Hi.

So, after about three months of planning to do it, I’m finally getting this blog started, and I’m going to get this thing off the ground with a BANG. As you can gauge from this, I’m a very impulsive and action driven person, so let’s get straight to the exciting stuff.

…

 I have to begin with some expectation management.

What not to expect from my blog:

1) Travel notes
What?? I know. I called this blog ‘travelnotes’ and, given that I recently moved from my home in a quiet London suburb to that beautiful, insomnia-prone disaster filmset, Lady New York City, it would make sense for this to be a blog documenting my travels. However obvious interpretation created by my move is nothing more than a happy coincidence. A nice double entendre. Looking through my pieces from this summer, and thinking about how to connect them together, I realized that the theme connecting everything seemed to be travel. Travelnotes is so called because most of the content was and will be written on various forms of transport. A lot of what I will be posting up here soon is stuff I wrote when I didn’t have a computer. It has been written on park benches, trains, buses and planes, going from London, to Birmingham to Edinburgh to St Albans to the U.S. of A. So by travelnotes, I mean it in a much more immediate and literal sense than just things that have happened to me ‘on the road’. It’s stuff I’ve thought about while in motion, outside of my home, and in limbo. The opposite of location-based writing I suppose. So I guess, in effect, the exact opposite of travel writing.

2) Narrative 

So most of the postings will be writing taken from my notebooks.  I use lots of notebooks. I pick one up in the morning, write in it in the day, put it down, and will almost definitely pick up a different one the next morning. This pattern has carried on for as long as I can remember.  So flicking through the pages, things written in consecutive days will rarely be in the same book, let alone next to each other.  When I open my notebook to start writing, I don’t fill them up page by page. I tend to open at a random page. This started because a lot of the time I write starter bits to go back to later, so I’d skip pages to leave room for pieces to be added to. But it’s kind of just how I roll now, whether I need to leave space or not. So my notebooks are basically tatty doodle pads with pages of unconnected writings, scribbles out, stars, moved paragraphs, several versions of the same paragraph, and pen and pencil smudges. And blog will probably resemble that structure pretty closely, mainly because that's pretty much the structure of my brain too. And tying all that stuff together and putting it in order is not a job I’m willing to do. It's why I'll never write a beautiful novel. Who needs linearity anyway?

So yeah, no travel notes and no distinct order or timeframe.  I’ve heard it said around that location and narrative are pretty central things to good writing, so I thought it was probably important to make people aware of their absence here. Happy Reading :)