So I ask you, is it a personal snub? Should I take it personally if someone I know cannot attend my wedding? What if the Wedding is five and a half thousand miles away from where I currently reside, is it a snub then? If the number of people attending compared to the number invited in this example are shrinking, in this instance, it is probably not that they don’t want to attend. Well in most instances one hopes, anyway. However in the current climate and because of the distance, it’s not like it is “just down the road” is it? So people may not attend for perfectly valid reasons. We are in recession. Our economy is shrinking. The exchange rate is dire in GBP to US Dollars. People have priorities like babies, bills to pay, and houses to buy, or houses to just, well, pay for. The cheek of it all. The majority of it is circumstance. Does it really matter? Probably not, we will get married anyway. We will have fun. Hopefully things will work out good. We should not and will not, take it personally.

So of what relevance is all that to this blog? I mention this to illustrate the difference between writing about a subject and writing about oneself. There is a difference in the above paragraph if you substitute “I” for words like “a” or “someone”. In the above example it would make a subtle difference to the point of view. It becomes a discussion about the subject rather than a discussion on the subject coupled with a light personal circumstance justifying rant about myself. Is the mini rant justified? Maybe it is. Is it relevant to the blog? Well that depends on how you wish to view it. In planning this blog, how I wish to use it, what I wish to give away in information, what is allowed and what isn’t, I had to make some choices. I will have to make similar choices in any projects I embark on, which I’ll discuss in future posts. One such choice was a thing I wish to avoid for this blog, and it is, the use of clichés. Now that might be something that everyone wishes to avoid. It is often remarked that it is easier said than done. One might consider it a challenge is to find out if this really is the case. For the purposes of this article the definition of cliché will be “those things that have been done umpteen times before as to make their usage, overused and common place”. A common thing I believe in this world of blogging. There is much writing out there and anyone who embarks on a journey either for a project or a blog likes to believe that this journey is unique to them. From a certain point of view this is true of course. This isn’t however, true to everyone else, if you don’t show it. If you proceed to talk or write about things that have occurred in other peoples lives, if there is nothing of relevance to show it from a different angle then are you not just writing the same thing again? Is it not the same as words that have been written before, with barely a different order? If this happens over and over can anyone not just write the story, once they are introduced to its beginning? Good stories take the basics that we know and shape them so they are a bit different. Great stories give another perspective on things, they take some new twists and turns. They create other worldly views and give rise to new thoughts. They make it seem like something entirely new, even if many of the elements have been used many times before.

Now not wishing to criticise the world of blogging (but I will anyway), there is nothing wrong with just telling us about your life. A blog is a blog is a blog. It can be about whatever the author / writer(s) want it to be about. It can be about your daily life, however boring or exciting that may be. It can be about your favourite thing from films to making rugs, to places to tour in Italy, to the stories of Oscar Wilde. There is nothing inherently wrong with this but I will add that this alone does not make it interesting. It could be interesting if you can strip out the cliché. It could be interesting if you take your subject and approach it from a subtly different angle. Maybe it doesn’t need to just be about you, unless you are super interesting of course which most people quite frankly, aren’t. Well that’s my rather general view of the world anyway. In truth a blog could take the form of a diary, I suppose an additional question this poses is whether the content is relevant to the rest of the world. Does it matter if it isn’t? Well no you can post for your friends and family, anyway I digress, I’m getting away from the point. Connected to this, there is also nothing wrong with a good rant, I plan on the odd one or two myself. There is nothing wrong with telling the world what you are up to. There is perhaps, in the approach. This author however, wishes to try and avoid too much cliché. Some will be inevitable of course. There are millions of blogs out there, they cannot all be unique. It is a challenge worth taking for me though, I believe it keeps a critical eye on proceedings and in keeping one eye on that, should promote creative thought. I intend to use this approach in my projects, an obvious point it seems now, but the relevance is the idea of the focus. Hopefully this approach (you can forgive me for that one) will make this, the blog, interesting for you, the reader, too.