Happy New Year

New Year's resolution - predictably, to pay more attention to this blog. After all, having taken the trouble to set it up I may as well use to say something.
A few months ago I went to a seminar about how writers could make money out of the Internet. I don't know that it did me a lot of good - I still haven't got around to putting context-sensitive advertising links on my Web pages or writing to everyone I know to ask them to buy a pay-per-click link, far less writing the hundreds of pithy, well-informed articles that would justify asking anyone for a subscription. Still, the fact that I haven't made millions doing these things is probably just inertia on my part.
What I found more interesting was a comment from a writer at this seminar. People, he said, are interested in what writers do. They want to read about how you spend your days in the shed feeding the cat.
Really?
Well, apart from the fact that I don't have a shed (although I do have a cat), I don't know. I've never quite been able to see what is so fascinating about writers. Deep-sea divers, lion tamers and mercenaries, maybe, but writers? Of course many writers have led exciting lives that are worth reading about (which is presumably why they write about them) but as writers per se, all we do is drive a pen or a keyboard, and while it's fun to do sometimes it can hardly be exciting to watch.
Which probably has a lot to do with why this blog hasn't really taken off yet. I've been working on the assumption that what you want to read about is my writing. But I don't really want to write about my my writing, because that would be like doing the day's work all over again. I don't know if this is a common problem.
I shall change my approach, though. From now on, unless anything out of the ordinary occurs to me, I shall only write about what I do when I'm not writing.
It's just occurred to me that this will have the added advantage of enabling me to sustain the illusion that novels and stories really do come out nowhere and write themselves!