The Blogging Rebel

(Or: Why My Head Is Leaking Ink Again)

Seventeen years ago… Great Britain was a different place. The sky was a different shade of grey, and if you wanted to “blog,” you had to use something called WordPress. That was it. One choice. It was like being told you could only eat one type of sausage, and that sausage was made of electronic wood.

But now? Luxury! We’re swimming in platforms. Ghost, Scribbles, Astro. They sound like a firm of Victorian undertakers or a brand of laundry detergent for Martians. If you can code, you’re away, no problem at all. You just type “Bleep-Bloop-Grommet” into a computer and—POOF!—you have a website.

So, it’s all very grand and shiny. But why do it? Has the world changed? Do I write these squiggly bits for the same reason I did back when I had all my original teeth?

(Pause for dramatic effect… Silence.)

Oh, crap. This is going to be a short one. I can feel my brain shutting down for tea.

The answer is: No. Nothing has changed. I blog now for the same reason I started. Because I’ve got something to say, and I don’t have a dog to talk to yet.

To blog without a monetisation plan was to embrace the philosophical enlightenment of a Zen master, a serenity abruptly shattered by the sudden need to bleed the brakes on a 2004 Vauxhall Corsa. We had bypassed the bloated, municipal water-treatment plant of modern digital marketing, choosing instead to manually pump raw, unfiltered prose straight from the cranial reservoir, gleefully letting the gears of un-monetised storytelling grind together without so much as a squirt of algorithmic WD-40.

Back in the Old Days—before the Great Internet Fog—people wrote personal stuff. Lovely, mad, useless stuff. They wrote about the meal they’d just cooked. “I had a boiled egg today,” they’d say. “It was oval and smelled of Tuesday.” They weren’t chefs. They just liked eggs. Nothing wrong with that. Simple, and strangely intriguing. Like a one-legged duck in a thunderstorm.

Then… the Content-Marketing Bollocks rolled in. Like a damp fart.

SQQUUUUEEELLLSSHHH!!

Suddenly, everyone was chasing “clicks.” Everyone was pretending that numbers on a screen actually meant they were loved. They started using SEO. In my day, SEO meant “Shout Everything Out!” Now it means “Searching for Elderly Onions” or some such marketing rot.

Half the blogs you read now are written by robots. Digital Muppets. They talk about “products” and “synergy.” They don’t sound like people; they sound like a vacuum cleaner trying to sell you a mortgage.

And then there’s the “Audience.”

I’m an indie author. You’d think I’d care about the audience. You’d think I’d be standing on a chair shouting, “LOOK AT ME, I AM WRITING WORDS! BUY THEM OR I SHALL EAT THIS BOOK!”

Nope.

I still write scraps of novels. Bits of dialogue where characters chat absolute shite to one another. I write rants about things that get under my skin—like why the holes in Swiss cheese are always in the wrong place.

Why? Because… I’m a rebel.

Yes! I like the sound of that. A Blogging Rebel.

Balls to the SEO! Balls to the content marketing and the shiny-suited spivs with their algo-wotsits. I’m going to keep writing whatever falls out of my head until the head itself falls off and rolls under the sideboard.

I’m a blogger. Just like seventeen years ago.

(Exit Andy, pursued by a giant search engine. He’s holding a large ceramic pot with a handle (a mug).)

INGLISH IZ GUD 4 U.