Andy Hawthorne

When I sit at my creative output delivery platform (desk, in the old world) conceiving of things to write about, I realise that dark matter is at least 27% responsible for what happened next. 

Ideation you see, readers, is not a simple matter of consuming gallons of liquid beverage (ideally, tea) and staring into space-time hoping for a Martian interstellar concept to drift into your orbit that you then use, to write a theorem deciphering loop quantum gravity, or the complete history of sentient staplers, or something equally dull. 

No, you have to formulate a notion or notions, conceived from the process of discovery that evolves from cosmic dust clouds or a thought bubble if you want to be all human about it. 

And when a notion, or the traces of one, arrives, it is often a matter of minor universal urgency — you have to grab it in the first 10^ −32 seconds or it will drift away. And it will be gone, forever lost to the Universe. And looking for it behind a curve can’t happen because the Universe is of course, flat. 

There is also a belief amongst some Verbiage Short Form Hackers (Bloggers, in old language) that ideas can be be bonded like atoms that go on to form molecules, or an idea good enough to write. But this is in fact, incorrect. An idea, you see, is still a point of debate. It may be similar to the singularity in the creation of the universe. Or, it may be entirely more vast and random. This is a hot topic among theoretical bloggers. 

Either way, you have to be careful that Sirius Cybernetics Corporation—or its smaller, equally soulless competitor, MegaCorp (a division of Corporate Entity Number 42)—and their constant surveillance, may capture your brilliant concept and make it universally known before you have chance to write it. 

But readers, let me finish by saying, if your neural sensors twitch when a atomic particle of an idea appears, you should immediately note it on your Essential Life Device (smartphone) or even the old-world pen and paper. Because, ideas are valuable. All of them, even the ones about why, for example, Red Leicester cheese is called ‘Red Leicester’ ( have discovered it is to do with the inclusion of a simple colouring agent, annatto, a substance so needlessly precise and yet so vaguely yellow that its mere existence is a minor victory for the intergalactic administrative sub-committee responsible for naming cheeses — a sub-committee which, it should be noted, has not met since the Great Feta Incident of 1978 and is mostly run by an obsolete filing cabinet.) 

But catch those nano-particles of ideas, readers. Because then, you will be able to craft posts like the trench coat-wearing punks of the cyber cell called the Blogosphere.