Writing Changes
Posted: Wed 5 December, 2007 Filed under: General 2 Comments »In some ways my writing life is currently getting very complicated. As well as the normal D4D™ posts, a few recently have become multi-use posts, getting duplicated (or edited and used, anyway) on either my photography blog, or the one on my company website. Although in fairness the one on the company site isn’t so much a blog as a series of articles and more coherent pieces instead of a daily/weekly updating thing with just braindump thoughts and news. However, they all combine to mean that I’m thinking in several ‘tones of voice’ at the same time, although I do aim to get the multi-use posts into a vaguely consistent and coherent tone that works cross-site in general.
In fact, that’s probably why I now swear far less on D4D™ than I used to. (Well, for the most part, anyway) I don’t know whether that’s a good or bad thing – D4D™ was always meant to be the personal site where I could let rip, vent, and generally be vile. Only I’ve kind of stopped doing that a lot of the time at the moment – maybe I’m just growing up? Nah, can’t be. Well, maybe…
Anyway, maybe as I progress with the other two blog-type writing areas, D4D™ will go back to being more of a venting pot than a thought-bouncing wall. Maybe.
Away from the blog-type areas, I’m also still working in CeltX on the two main ‘commercial’ writing ideas. I’ve been dumping the ideas, characters, and plot/storyline bits into two different projects on CeltX, and now I “just” need to start figuring out how the hell everything hangs together – I’ve got the (very) rough theme sketched out, but I still have some gaping holes where I need to figure out not just the where and the why, but also the how and the who. Not much work really – honest.
So all told at the moment I’ve got four big writing areas on the go, as well as the website writing/creation/programming, and the usual bey bevy of letters on the go.
All in all, it makes me wonder whether I can keep all those balls in the air at the same time, and particularly whether I can keep them all fresh. I don’t want any of the blog bits to turn into a tumbleweed-ridden ghost town, but I’ll close them down if I have to. Thing is, I’ve a feeling they’re going to start getting some interest – and then I’m knackered.
Thankfully, the ideas do keep on flowing. Braindumping the two big ‘commercial’ ones onto the laptop has meant that there’s now headspace for other ideas to come in – not just blog stuff, but other potential commercial bits, depending on how the first two do. Polymath, me? Possibly.
“bey of letters” ohhh get ‘im!
It’s odd reading all this for, whilst I’m not also writing a novel (as I write for a living, it’s all I can do somedays to write a comment on a blog) I too have gone through similar thoughts. The self-censoring is understandable as, whether you like it or not, all your personas are linked and it’s hard to switch from one to the other completely seamlessly.
Whilst I know my writing style on my “pro” blog is different from that on my “amateur?” blog, I can see that they are both impacting on each other. All of that is different from my formal writing style I use at work, and my email style which is… ohh you get the picture. It’s easier to manage things if you aren’t trying to be 4 different people (and I think better to allow part of your personality into your writing).
Bollocks. Fixed now. That’ll teach me, writing too fast on a laptop with a progressively ropier keyboard. *sigh*
In fairness, I’m not really trying to be four people – more like two. D4D™ definitely carries parts of my personality, as do the other bits – they’re just different facets of that personality, and I can separate them out for the most part. There’s the occasional fuck-up, but yeah in general you can see the same ‘writing persona’ in all of them.
Really, the personas are to keep D4D™ unattached to the business stuff – if those two meet, it could mean trouble at t’ mill, but so long as they don’t, things are groovy. Mostly.