In 2008, a friend said I should write more whacky, thought-provoking posts…
“What, you mean my blogs aren’t whacky enough already?!?”
“No, no. I mean I like what you write on your telecoms risk website, talkRA.com, about technology and assuring revenues and the ways that telcos screw up and get things wrong. The serious posts are pretty good, but the best ones are where you go off on a tangent, and end up analysing why the Millennium Falcon shouldn’t have flown to the Rebel base on Yavin 4, or where you present a comic play about Facebook in the future. You should write more blogs like that.”
“Well, I like writing them. But other people prefer the serious stuff. They might get fed up, if I did less of the proper blogs and more of the silly ones.”
“Then start a new website, just for the silly ones.”
So I did, and I called it Halfthoughts. It ended up getting so silly that I wrote about literally anything I wanted, whether it was stories about meetings of misanthropes or comic essays on what life would be like if zombies were real. And I took all this nonsense so seriously that I eventually started writing proper stories for fancy magazines that get printed on paper.
Without Halfthoughts, and the business blogs that came before it, I would never have contemplated writing fiction for real magazines. But now I do. So after 350 weekly posts, I must bow to the inevitable. There simply is not enough time to write fiction for publication elsewhere, maintain my business website and to post a new halfthought every week. As I prefer to maintain quality over quantity, future halfthoughts will not degenerate into quarterthoughts, though they will only be published on a monthly basis… unless I fancy writing a bit more frequently than that. We shall have to see. The problem is, I found that writing proved as addictive for me as heroin is for some other people. If I can find time to write more, I will. And if you care to take a look at what I have written, then so much the better.
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