An Introduction.

About six months ago I decided I really wanted to concentrate on writing, but struggled awfully with finding stuff to write about. I’d sit for ages brainstorming article ideas or what I thought might make at least sort-of funny topical pieces, but the whole process was just too arduous. After finally selecting a subject, I’d write some bit-better-than-mediocre stuff, but get distracted or bored and end up half-arsing or abandoning it. I felt I had to spend time writing, but mostly just drew bubbles in the centre of A4 pages with the word ‘ideas’ stuck in the middle. Long story a bit shorter, I needed an instant ideas machine so I could sit down and just write. There weren’t any in the shops, so I had to get creative. Sticky tape, nails and a hole punch didn’t help, nor did building a Lego car. My eventual machine wasn’t a machine at all. It came in the form of a book - a school’s German to English dictionary I’d picked up six months previous in a lame attempt to improve my (German) vocabulary. It was decided (by me) I would randomly select a word from the German side, take its translation, then write a potentially humorous improvised piece of a few hundred words based on the result. Determined never to cheat I started small with a few entries in a word processor file and just went from there, writing whatever came into my head. Last week I reached the 30,000 word mark and for some reason felt compelled to share it with anyone who cared to read it on the Internet. My get-out-of-criticism-free card states all my entries are written quickly in a single sitting of absolutely no more than an hour, and are only crudely edited. Shit excuse actually, but it’s true. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. In fact they generally work about as well as a nifty-looking gadget from a pound shop - seemingly quite well at first, but break far too easily when submerged in dreadful metaphors. Luckily though, all my pieces are quite short, so won’t waste too much of your day. Any comments will be graciously accepted, although I’ll probably just delete the anything I disagree with. No, I actually don’t care. All criticism is good criticism. Apart from the stuff that says you’re not that good. Note that my un-German keyboard and my inability to work out how to add various uniquely German characters means there's a good few spelling errors in the entry titles - for this I apologise! Anyway, my Crispy Chicken and Chips are ready, so this isn’t going any further.

Hope you enjoy it a tiny bit, and thanks for reading!

Andrew.

-------------------

A year later...now 3/1/10.

Precisely one year ago I begun committing the entries previously saved in a Microsoft Works Word Processor file called Improvised German To English Dictionary Writings.wps (I'm far too poor for Word) to this blog. If you glance through the posts in chronological order, you'll see they've evolved (or devolved?) from smaller, hardly edited bits to slightly (slightly-slightly) more polished longer word-dumps. There's been a slow creep from my original 10 minute time limit, to one hour, to now approximately two to three per word. German word that is, not word-count word, otherwise that'd take forever. Now, whether this extra investment in time genuinely makes the output better or if it's just proof of my decreasing attention span and heightened older-age thickness levels - I'm not sure. In any case, after a huge drop-off in entries after January last year, I intend to get back on track in 2010 with more frequent useless bits of attempted humour. Thanks for reading.

Andrew.