Harder Better Faster Fats: Blogging a.k.a. spurting your eyes, blood-style

Last week, I revealed my unease about 2013. I said I'd blog my way through that unease, because if blogging isn’t about opening a vein and spurting liquid innards into the surprised face of the reader, then what is it for?

Before we get stuck into this week’s execrable navel-gazing, here’s a track you should listen to.



I neglected this blog last year partly because of my entirely worthy work with Electronic Sound and Now Then Manchester (you should read both). The latter published an interview I did with The Orb. Lawks! Meanwhile, this site shrivelled

A METAPHOR.

Here’s a metaphor.

Imagine a hugely promising contestant on The Voice. Week after week, the contestant soars and thrills to the delight of the judges.

In one fateful week, the contestant comes on naked, covered in peanut butter, and riding miniature unicycle circles on top of Tom Jones’ sturdy hair. No-one would enjoy it. Not even me. Everyone would say, “I liked it when Fats was clothed and singing.”

Last year, my blog stopped singing and instead it donned the peanut bu-- wait, is this metaphor working? Should I put my clothes on? Sit STILL, Tom.

THE MEANING OF IT ALL.

Although my non-blogging work continues to be fun and exciting, I missed blogging here.

I don’t know whether it’s the instant validation of comments and stats, whether it’s the therapeutic nature of structured writing, or whether it's because have a massive ego and if it was the 1700s, I’d be building follies instead. I just know that I like writing in this format.

Listen to that track. Caribou’s Sun is a track frozen in my memory as playing over Deaf Institute speakers into my drunken brain after the Manchester Blog Awards in 2010. A focus amid the haze.

Blogging feels like that focus. Amid the chaotic, diagonal leglessness of life, it's that little, repeated thing that keeps me grounded.

"Sun, sun, sun," I slurred while dribbling into my beer.

RELAUNCH.

My first move this year was to relaunch this blog for a ‘world wide Buzzfeedernet’ (broadsheets, you can have that phrase). Shorter paragraphs, more

white

space, and a posting schedule that saves

Friday for fluffier, more visual stuff.

It's going alright. Fat Roland on Electronica was tied to a pre-EDM outlook. Netloafer has loosened things up. It's already earned a plug from MC Hammer on his Twitter feed (hello to my new readers: sorry it's not that hip hop).

This was a rather whimsical blog post. My fiction writing is tighter than that, honest.

Which, incidentally, will be the subject of the next instalment of Harder Better Faster Fats.

(Pictured: Caribou)