Blogging with style and substance.

Where on earth do all the topic ideas come from?

I remember when I started writing a biweekly column in our local news paper, I was concerned that the ideas  might dry up. At that time, I was expected to work within a rather limited range of subjects : "The politics of fishing (angling and the commercial fishery)". But as the weeks rolled by, and I built up an inventory of subjects long before my deadlines arrived, I soon began to realize that there was no shortage of targets for my somewhat biased opinions.

When it comes to blogging, where there does not have to be any single overall theme, the world seems to spray out topics with gay abandon. Some of these come from the news of the day, others from just wandering around with eyes and ears wide open, and of course, a notebook at hand in which they can be jotted down before they evaporate from my somewhat ephemeral memory... until I have the opportunity to expand them into the masterpieces which flow so readily from my spell checking, word processing computer programme.

I do prefer that my blogs convey a message, and that they can be written with a casual, tongue in cheek style, a touch of humour, and that they provide an opportunity for both a headline and a punchline. Since there are no deadlines when it comes to blogging, as there were with the newspaper articles I wrote, or with the club and NGO bulletins which I used to edit, or the real estate magazine which I used to publish, writing really is much more enjoyable than it was in years gone by. 

Not forgetting that one picture is purported to be worth a thousand words, I also enjoy illustrating them with my own photography, or the occasional (preferably non copyright) illustration discovered on the internet.

I can only hope that my "followers", as blog readers are known, find them entertaining too.