Today was the first day of my new job. I think I've forgotten to mention - what with Christmas and temporarily becoming a vampire and the Santa Wars and Disney War and all of the other wars*; not to mention trying to figure out why the internet keeps sending people who want things like vampire hippo porn my way (latest bizarre search term: Ivana Trump garter belt) and such - that I accepted a part-time, permanent post towards the end of last year.
This feels like a fairly massive oversight, especially when you consider that this blog was, in its early days, largely about work, or more accurately the absence of work - my decision to leave a perfectly good job without really being sure what I might do next, the highs and lows of freelancing, and so on. It seems a little odd, in hindsight, that I didn't think to mention the phone call asking me if I'd consider the position, or the day I spent filling in the application form. Ditto the half-day interview, the negotiations about how many days a week I'd work, and the endless paperwork I had to fill in once we'd reached an agreement.
But I didn't talk about any of those things here. To be honest, it never even crossed my mind that I might.
I suppose what that really reflects is the changing nature of this blog. What used to be a platform for my jumbled thoughts about scary things like work and life choices and Making Decisions about The Future somehow turned into a place to write about animal smugglers and dead French people and directionally-challenged snails and largely-unknown German pop songs; basically whatever I felt like writing about at the time.
This flies in the face of pretty much every single piece of advice about blogging I've ever read (know your audience! Choose a focus! Stay on topic!) and that worries me a bit. It's been a while now since I first realised just how much my focus had shifted (and by shifted I mean vanished). At first I wondered if I should find something else to concentrate on - books and writing seemed like a logical choice, given how much I've blogged about those things in the last year or so - but then I realised there were too many other things I'd miss being able to write about. I considered starting a separate blog for the book-ish and leaving this one for everything else, but then I worried about finding enough everything-else to talk about. Tomato bazookas don't grow on trees you know.
The more I think about it, the more I realise I don't want to be one of those niche bloggers. I'd rather write a little bit about lots of different things than concentrate on just the one. It's the same way I approach most things in life - give me a menu and there's a good chance I'll go for the tapas plate.
So for now, at least, it's business as usual. Working for three days a week might mean it's business a little less often than usual, but when I do manage to post it will be the same old eclectic mix of music and books and random news stories, with the occasional rant thrown in. It probably isn't the best strategy for increasing readership or improving my professional reputation, but then again, those aren't the reasons I blog in the first place.
That's not to say I don't appreciate having readers. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth; I am still surprised and thrilled to bits whenever I discover someone is actually reading the words I occasionally cobble together and send out into the void. It's an absolutely lovely feeling. So thank you, by the way. I probably don't say that enough.
*There were no other wars.
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