Keeping a blog has done several things for me. The first is that it’s one of the few modes of writing that you publish instantly, and get an instant response. Not everyone wants that, but I like the sense of keeping in touch with what interests readers, and what they think. The second is that long ago someone said to me, “If you want to be a writer, write every day. Doesn’t matter much what you write, but you have to do it all the time.” The blog gave me a way of writing one short piece every day about what was going on around me. Readers bugged me if I didn’t write. And after a few months I had a message from TallSkinnyKiwi, one of the granddaddies of blogging, that said “I like your blog better now. You seem to have found your voice.”

The voice matters. When I started the blog eight years ago I was writing academic papers, lectures, supervision reports and committee reports. I knew more about theology than was strictly necessary, and I could write things down that made sense, words in the right order, delivering the information. That’s what I had been trained to do. But in the process I had lost my voice; in fact, one adviser in particular had criticised me for writing “too much like a book” and insisted I rewrite some materials in a strictly technical style. The blog helped me to recover and develop a voice again.

But you know what? Before the blog I had been published – a chapter or two in a book here and there. But the blog itself actually won me two publishing contracts. I didn’t have an agent; I didn’t send a manuscript to anyone. The publisher came to me and said “We want somebody who writes like you.”

So there you go. Now I write weekly instead of daily on the blog because I spend a lot of time writing books in the voice I developed here. Right now I’m finishing a manuscript for the book of 2011. When it’s done I have to decide what to write for the one after that. Any thoughts?

Sudden Death – it’s an awful, tragic thing when a young person dies suddenly and unexpectedly. Here’s an article about it.

Autism and Employment – a heartening story

Church website design. I’m
in the middle of having my site completely redesigned by a fab young
genius I met recently. But who knew the whole world of Church websites
was so interesting…

Examiners (human ones that is) may become redundant if this new computer examination stuff passes muster. Not sure whether to be happy or sad about that. I’m not convinced a computer is a good judge (it might be more accurate in some respects, but can a computer spot flair, ingenuity, imagination?) but having just signed up for a round of examining, the idea of NOT marking scripts is strangely appealing.

the first Fresh Expressions church to be created outside the parish system (apparently)

The irresistible aspects of the Anglicans-to-Rome story

Last of all, squeezed in between all the other stuff going on here at the minute, I find myself back in touch with two guys I played music with in my teens. We’ve been out of touch for a long long time, and suddenly here we are planning a bit of a reunion. With guitars of course. Here’s one of the tunes I learned from them when I was about 13.