528: Anatomy of a Blog Post

Sometimes it's hard to start writing a blog post. Things I can see: a This is Spinal Tap DVD, an empty toilet roll tube, a Jew's harp (or Jaw harp if you prefer), 30^th birthday cards all pushed together and standing atop the FreeSat box, a small red plastic chair for a child, How Not To Grow Up by Richard Herring, a pocket hardback about Hokusai with The Great Wave compulsorily on the cover, a glass of delicious Kraken black spiced rum, an empty and a half full bottle of nail polish remover, a child's toy accordion still in the colourful cardboard box, a Peppa Pig height chart. That is everything of importance. Everything else in the room fits under the umbrella term "miscellanea and trivia".

Sometimes it's hard to continue a blog post smoothly into the second paragraph. Either one communicates too much in the first paragraph leaving little else to be said, or one communicates too little in the first paragraph meaning the second has little to go on. So now is as good a time as any to admit I have become addicted to Failbook ("Social Media from Facepalms to High-Fives"). Conservative estimates judge the time I spend flicking through Failbook, further and further back in time, to be too much. They also judge it to be puerile and time wasting, but then again those conservatives are so judgemental. I assume.

By the third paragraph I often find myself checking the word count (245) to see how close I have come to an acceptable minimum length. The usual result is to discover that there is not nearly enough words being counted by word count, and I'll have to work a bit harder, push a little further, in order to give word count more words to count. Word? (299) (300) By this point I'm usually approaching the end of paragraph three and just beyond paragraph four I can see the tedious conclusion looming.

Paragraph four's role is usually that of a summation or conclusion. Or, if you prefer, a denouement. So at around this point I am writing more words to extend the word count, doing a call back or two to an earlier allusion (or two), and hoping, if at all possible, to end on a joke. I like jokes; they are funny. Sometimes it just seems more appropriate to just cut to the chase, cut my losses, give up the ghost, stop. Just skip to the end, i.e. the bit that says The End, or if you prefer, Fin. At this point I've not worked out which of the two options to take. (436)