new friends

New folk who have friended this LJ - you are most welcome. Do feel free to introduce yourselves if you'd like to do so.

And please don't be offended if I don't 'friend' you back - it's simply due to lack of time. What I do make a habit of doing, however, is to drop into people's LJ's when I have some time, so I'll probably show up over at your place sooner or later, with a bottle, and perhaps some snacks.

Meta journal

I've been thinking about this for a while now. A new person on the f-list gave me a wonderful quote about the LJ - it's messy, he says (correctly), but also friendly (I hope so!). Occasionally I wonder why I write about what I do, not in my fiction, but in blogs. Like the sff.net newsgroup I run, this began as a writer's journal and rapidly segued into an impenetrable swamp of recipes, cats and dogs and gods, politics, rants, movies, relationships, witchcraft shops, memes, disasters, alcohol-fuelled nights out, visits to foreign places, gardening, horse racing, hopefully amusing anecdotes and all of this does, basically, reflect my life, more or less, with some significant omissions and probably quite a lot of things that are really rather dull to anybody who isn't me. Which, let's face it, is most of you, unless things are a lot more solipsistic than I think they are.

Some people compartmentalise and some people are (and feel free to slap me for this, because it is just un peu pretentious), holistic. I'm in the latter camp: everything I do affects pretty much everything else that I do. The writing impacts on my relationship and vice versa. My family (elderly relatives, social visits) impact on my writing. Running this household impacts on the work I do for Witchcraft Ltd and so on and so forth.

A friend of ours, who is a hypnotist but also a plumber, came round today to fix our heating system*. As he was walking through the hall, he glimpsed me with the vaccuum cleaner in one hand, a pan of onions in the other, a laptop in the other (well, you know what I mean) and he said: Women. My God. What do you call that thing you do?

Multitasking, I said, to a man who helped fix a weed whacker and give advice about the mowing machine plus a discussion of the malfunctioning of a Cadillac's wiper motor, en route to his actual job of mending the plumbing. And sometimes, I said, it goes horribly wrong. And I don't even have kids.

But the thing is, it's integrated (except perhaps the horse racing). There are some things I don't go into (too boring, too private, affects other people), but generally this is one writer's life.

I don't seek out certain types of blogs. One person writes about hiking, another about the workplace, some are mostly memes. I find it really interesting. Other people's lives are, even when they think they're dull. I am often struck by the thought (slightly depressing, but perhaps not) that if the archives of the net survive, this is what we'll all become famous for, not the books at all.

*He has fixed it. At least, I think he has.