The Vented Spleen

One of my all-time favourite TV characters is Hank Moody, the writer from Californication. Hank says, "Being a writer is like having homework for the rest of your life." This my friends, is an unfortunate truth.

Today, my homework is almost day late. My dog didn't eat it. I don't even have a dog. My excuse is simple; I have a wedding in less than three weeks and I had to construct a polystyrene model of my seating chart.

In this unique approach, the model is constructed using the back of a child-sized, thermoplastic mobile phone courtesy of your local JB Hi-Fi store. Cue one black texta, a fiancé with the artistic capacity to juxtapose an A4 table plan onto a larger canvas, and 87 toothpicks with guests names sticky taped around them. I am now the proud owner of something that looks like a strategy plan for the 2010 AFL grand final.

Before you ask, it is a completely normal part of the wedding planning process to model your guests as toothpicks. More broadly, the wedding is also an excellent excuse for procrastinating other things and putting the rest of your life, "on hold". But, at a minimum, the blog must go on.

The thing is, I refuse to bore you or be repetitious. I was jotting in my journal yesterday, the launching place of most pieces, and while the content was pleasing, your shiny little heads kept popping into my mind, telling me it just wouldn't do.

Being conscious of my audience is a professional hazard. This awareness is not an act of deliberation, it is purely instinctual. The "known" audience, however, is a much more frightening phenomenon.

Australian author, Tim Winton believes that writing is a process of venting the spleen. While cathartic, it can also be excruciating. It has been a tumultuous fortnight and everything gleaned from my spleen seemed either too provocative or was tied by puppet strings to one of my previous topics.

I do my best to avoid the soap box here, although it often finds me as I pour my thoughts on to the page. It bursts from the ground like a jack-in-the-box and I have to force myself to step over it, tempting as it is. Unsolicited ramblings are one thing, unwarranted ramblings are another.

In a quest for inspiration, I serve only to intimidate myself with other people's highly developed, visually pleasing and amusing blogs.

I read about a writer who believes it should take no more than an hour to write a blog post. This was a startling and disturbing revelation to me, who spends anywhere from three to seven hours crafting my post until it no longer nips my fingers as they leave the keyboard. To this writer, the blog was a simply another tool in the toolshed. A no holds barred device for unzipping the soul.

From herein, I pledge to worry more about what I want to write and less about what you want to read. After all, my "homework" is not really work at all. There is a very fine line between the editor and the edited.

I want to be neither.