That title and this graph are fairly representative of what I laughingly refer to as my “creative thought process“. Pretentious as that is, it’s still marginally preferable to “nicking other people work and augmenting it with amusing couplets“. For example while I was attempting to weave Ballistic Lozenge into an bike mag article, my semantic direction was shunted onto a branch line marked “Pelaton Sausages and Endurance Cabbages“.

Inevitably the diminishing cerebral mass was then entirely focussed on partnering vegetables to non obvious adjectives, and the moment was lost. Article unwritten, attention distracted, browser opened, someone else’s pie chart sniggered at.

This is why I have the greatest respect for Dave who gave up a perfectly responsible job to write his own book. Not only is Dave properly coffee-splutteringly amusing more than once in a while, he’s also a fellow cyclist. Okay, mainly a roadie but even such poor genre judgement in no way distracts from a ballsy project with uncertain earnings at the end of it.

My sympathy for Dave is mitigated by his weekly entries of fantastic cycling in myriad locations – allegedly to support his forthcoming publication. It’s often said that everyone has a book in them, and frankly – for most – that’s the best place for it to stay. The bookshelf of the mind is littered with terrible ideas, rubbish plots, unformed characters and educationally sub normal grammar.

Ask me how I know 🙂 So much as I would love to sit in my lovely wooden office, looking outside into the fields and being consumed with literary fervour, realistically my only marketable skills involves technology, shouting at people and waving my hands around in an attempt to deflect criticism.

This is not entirely disappointing. Like riding bikes for a living, I cherish the stereotype that writing for food would in some way cheapen and diminish the very thing I enjoy doing. And the pay is rubbish; for every JK Rowling, there’s a slew of breadline unpublished authors desperate for a break. Maybe that’s eBooks, but the signal to noise ratio suggests even a successful ebooker is barely going to raise their level of poverty to “imperceptibly above the breadline”

Not everyone can be an astronaut eh? So is there a point to my rambling? Not really, but that shouldn’t come as shock for my regular reader(s). Maybe it’s just the grinding realisation of yet another upcoming birthday that if it hasn’t happened yet, it probably isn’t going to. This is the kind of pretentious nonsense that calls for a bike ride and some piss taking.

I think I’ll go and do that then.