Coastalblog

I do try, believe me. I spent so many years haranguing the bored, the desperate, and those who merely couldn't escape about music and how desperately important it was that now, when I (whisper it) am a bit too busy to keep with every slightest development I still, for what it's worth, attempt to keep half an eye on what's going on. I feel like it's a betrayal of every poor soul I forced to listen to the obscure short run Arab Strap single I'd hunted down, or, lord save me, record company promo samplers featuring bands I JUST KNEW would rock the world. it's almost a heresy to retread old ground. But, there is quite a bit to be said for wallowing in nostalgia, and when this evening I stumbled upon a load of old DJ shadow stuff (whilst looking for something else, good old serendipity) it was with some relief that I bunged it on, and relived a few old thoughts as the tea cooked. Okay, fine, I'm getting old.

Ancient chinese proverb apparently. Don't worry, I've not become a life coach or anything like that. Nor will coastalblog shortly become a vehicle for flogging my ebook "five steps to a better you because the old you was rubbish" or anything like that. However, in one of my trawls through the entertaining world of hackwork as discussed yesterday, this popped up. In short I'm writing a bunch of captions for various "inspirational" quotes for some book or other. It's a fairly unedifying bit of ghost-writing for the most part. But every once in a while one of the "inspirational" quotes is, actually, inspirational. Certainly to me, anyhow, as a lifelong hidebound idiot who'd rather die than admit not knowing something I found myself writing the caption and thinking "you know, I really should follow my own advice here." Though I think I'll have to retool it to be slightly more accurate: "He who asks has it in his damn fo...

Unusually, I haven't been thinking a lot about writing. Or, rather, I haven't been thinking a lot about writing the way I usually think about writing. a mixture of anxiety and guilt which does no one any good. Least of all the reader as I proffer the hastily cobbled together nonsense in front of them. No siree Bob, for reasons too complex to go into, your humble correspondent has been thinking about writing more in terms of structure, word count, what precisely goes where. It's been an oddly liberating experience. To cut a long story short, I've been exploring the world of freelancing, which has led me down some odd paths and caused me to pick up some fairly arcane knowledge (go on, ask me about the likely direction of the price of silver). Not really as a money making exercise (spoiler alert, there isn't any), more as a thing to do of a morning when I've been woken up by the latest addition to the family at Coastal towers, and also just, y'know, to see....