Hypatia Avenue

"But you can't see what I'm wearing."
"That's why it's so sexy." - me and August D in chat last night.

Well, carrying on from my musing about IM, I've begun to muse about blogging too. Yes, I write this for people to read - and I've got a comments service, a link to my email and a series of cunningly placed questions and hints throughout my entries to encourage people to not just read but to tell me they're reading as well. Even when there is no response to what I've written, I get a buzz from knowing that if anyone wants to know what I've been doing, what I've been thinking, what I've been getting angry/upset/terribly excited about, then they can get it here, in my language, on my terms. This blog is my property and is entirely*my* thing - it's basically *me* tailored for the net and for public access.

Yes, it is narcissistic and a text-based form of ego-baiting. But this isn't the only reason why I take up so much cyberspace with my rambling. Why did I start blogging? Well, are you sitting comfortably...?

initially, I got hooked on the LiveJournals of some fanfic writers, who were using their LJs to run trailers and hints and clues to their stories with diversions into describing their RLs. Then I got to know a few blogs and their bloggers and loved the fact I was reading their thoughts and thinking in their style and personality - and I got thinking...

I write. Not as much or as often as I would like, but I've always got my illegible handwriting in my paper diary, I've always got my notebooks, I've always got the back of used envelopes, post-it notes, till receipts and, on one memorable, the last five verses of a poem I was writing on half a roll of toilet tissue which was used in a gut-wrenchingly ill-timed coffee spillage before I could transfer my verse to a less absorbent medium. I have my "real" writing, my private writing and lots of it. What I'm lacking is some public writing - and as I have yet to secure any contracts with newspapers and/or magazines, theatres, TV companies or websites to get my words and thoughts to the public, I've got this blog. It keeps my private writing, well...private. And better organised and far less insular and agonising than before the blog, because I've got this public forum to sort out what I want to keep to myself from what I want to cover with the world.

I also used this blog as a way to learn how to be a techie geek. Did you know, I treated this blog as a "Learn HTML and other Techie Stuff" project and, though the seasoned bloggers may scoff and scorn, I *did* research all sorts of blogs and LJs and read as much as I could on how they worked, what I could change in them, what codes, tags, XML and syndication were, CSS and so on.It was a chance to be academic as well as to nuture my self-esteem.

So, I set up the Avenue and let my imagination, webskills and general red-faced ranting run free, for yours and my reading pleasure. This is my blog: welcome to my playground. Be careful on the swings and roundabouts, okay?