New Beginning

Well first off I don't know if you can be an immanent wanderer. Perhaps you can tell me what you think about that.

Getting down to business, I'm now likely to move my online blogging and creative writing here, largely because I'm bored with Livejournal, but also partly because that blog has a very specific voice which an about face would adversely affect. I'm proud of what I've done with it, but I do want to write in a different way, perhaps more creatively, and this is the first place I'm going to try.

I've been developing my skills as a photographer for some time you could argue. But it was only after summer 2005 when I got my first Panasonic Lumix and then this January when I got my Nikon D50 DSLR that I began to take it seriously. Now I have friends and regular contributors on Flickr who keep insisting that I do it professionally. I'd never thought of myself as a creative person before - hearing this for the first time was a shock to the system. Yet before going back to university I didn't think of myself as an intellectual person either, and I comprehensively proved I was. Strange, the things you feel the need to know about yourself as you get older. These things didn't matter to me in my twenties - not much did - yet now they feel like cornerstones of my world. Ursula Wall, my guitar teacher when I was 10 would be thrilled.

I've just finished listening to a podcast interview with Allan Heinberg - writer of Marvel's Young Avengers and it's only added fuel to this feeling of creativity I'm constantly almost overwhelmed by, and this sense that I want to give voice, my unique voice, to aspects of the world which I "get" and other people might not understand. Heinberg has managed to change people's lives with that book through giving voice to Billy and Teddy - two straightforward gay teens, who are amongst the principal characters, and who also happen to be together in the most matter-of-fact way. In the publishing world that may not set the world alight, but in the comics world it's a seismic change. I guess I felt I'd touched on this when I succeeded in taking this:



I'd captured an essential quality of Brian Haw, and it affected people. How then could I really continue bleating in the same way on Livejournal? How could that sort of writing do anything other than bug people in the end? So I'm here, wondering what I can do with this keyboard, words and my imagination. I'm mulling over multiple creative projects which it would be nice to have parters in this country or others, in attempting. Tom's idea of visiting Chernobyl in particular has had a hold of me ever since he voiced it.