It’s been about a year since I decided to learn how to program in Cocoa so that I could design and build my own application for writing in. I’ve been meaning to write down my thoughts on this process and on the reasons I decided to embark on this project for some time, so thought I’d start this ‘blog as a place for those, and other, more general, blatherings.
The last ‘blog I started (over on LiveJournal) died a death after only a few entries. It started with a rant on Why I Hate The Lord Of The Rings Films, and degenerated (which was quite a feat in itself) into an angry rant about how someone had stolen my son’s name. I’m hoping this one will fare better.
It’s probably safe to say that the reasons for my decision to build a writing application and for me deciding to start this ‘blog are one and the same: procrastination. It means I don’t have to face the fact that I’m not doing the one thing I should be doing: working on The Novel. It’s a strange doublethink: I *want* to work on The Novel, but I feel I can only ever look at it sideways, like the spaceship on the cricket pitch in So Long and Thanks For All the Fish. So I find a hundred other things to do to avoid facing it. One of my favourite quotes in this regard comes from the film Sliding Doors (otherwise complete tosh): when the writer boyfriend of Gwynneth Paltrow bursts into the pub announcing that he’s got amazing news, his best friend asks him if he’s finished his novel. The writer looks at him with contempt and snaps, “Of course not – I’m a writer, I’ll never finish the novel.” So at the moment I’m headed the Peter Camenzind route: forever collecting notes and writing down snippets, but never putting it all together.
There are some good ‘blogs out there too (and from here on in, as much as it pains me, I shall abandon the grammatically-correct apostrophe that prefixes ‘blog – blog, there we go, that… wasn’t… so… pain…ful), so I guess I also want to try my hand at this medium.
As for the name, Literature and Latté, I always wanted to open up a coffee-cum-bookshop-cum-vegetarian-café with that name. I’ve probably been beaten to it somewhere – certainly the phrase googles a few hits. But it kind of sets the sort of tone I want for myself here – general coffee-conversational waffle in a bookish setting. And the Marcus Aurelius quote is just there ‘cos it’s one of my favourites, but it may well prove to be very apt: trite babbling, and I’ll probably forget all about the blog after a few posts. God and Guatama, as I used to say when I didn’t know any better.
There, that’s as good a blog introduction as any. Or at least, ‘t’will do.