That was an attention grabbing title, I am sure you’ll agree.

It is partly true, it is also partly a personal challenge.

In the two years since I started this blog, I have written a grand total of 458 blog posts – an average of about four a week.

The point of the blog was to exercise my writing muscle in preparation for my magnus opus – a great Irish blockbuster.

What has transpired is slightly different. When I started writing the blog, I was mostly writing short stories, and had made a few desperate, tragic attempts to write an actual book. It is my struggles in these endeavours that persuaded me start writing posts about the day to day occurrences in my unremarkable life. The sole intention was to hone my writing skills, and to translate these newly developed abilities into the creation of a book.

However the blog took on a life of its own. It became a means in and of itself.

I abandoned the writing of prose stories, in favour of plays – partly due to ego.  I have a means of getting my plays seen by an audience in a manner that is far easier than with the published word. I can stage them with a dramatic group, or as part of a theatre festival.

The initial plan was to cast myself in these plays – it avoids the need for auditions where you are likely to be rejected if you are the star of your own work. Later I realised that writing characters for other people to perform and direct could be just as rewarding as appearing in the pieces. Less stressful also – I think people sometimes mistakenly assume that just because you have written a script, that it is magically easier to remember.

This is not true.

These theatrical excursions continue apace. I have a number of pots on the boil at the moment.

But what about all that writing that I have self-published on this blog. There’s enough text up there to make up three full size books. A lot of it is dribble I know. But I really ought to try to harvest the content into a printed something.

This blog has no theme and no real direction – it’s just personal blatherings about my day to day life – plays I have seen, concerts I have attended, books I have read, holidays I have taken.

One common theme that people seem to enjoy more than most, are my journeys to the wastelands on my daily commute.

Yesterday, on my first day back at work this year, I did an inventory check on the blog contents.

There are enough stories concerning my commute to perhaps fashion into something more substantial. It will require quite a lot of work and quite a lot of extra content.

It won’t be a novel. That would require starting from the very beginning. It remains a plan that one day I will write an actual novel. That day has not yet arrived however.

I have written a book. Now I just need to find it – within the hundreds of thousands of words I have written since January 2015. The skeleton is there. I now need to fashion it into a stylish body.

This could take a long time mind.

This is a declaration of intent.