The Promise of January
THE PROMISE OF JANUARY
The extended family have returned to their various corners of the country; the browning, pinus radiata has been dumped on the nature strip and the supermarket mince tarts have been replaced by hot cross buns: It’s mid-January and it’s time to commit to that blog that you’ve been threatening to start since … last January.
I’m not alone: the online literary world is littered with the empty vows of well-intentioned blogs that giddily launched into the promise of January only to wilt in the morass of May.
The trend even predates the internet. Jane Austen’s monthly bulletin ‘I daresay’ arrived with much fanfare in the northern winter, yet was a mere memory by the time of the summer debutant balls in Hampshire. Sophocles faired little better: his periodic parchment ‘Oedipus Next’ launched after the winter solstice in mid Gamelion 457BC & historians have found no evidence of it beyond Skirophorion in the same Attic Calendar year. Even Franz Kafka had a crack, but the intended audience for his ‘Metamorphosis’ newsletter were cockroaches who couldn’t read, so he turned the blog into a novella.
I have to admit that this isn’t even my first attempt at starting a blog in January. The overly ambitious ‘Damian Callinan Writes a New Story Every Hour, Every Day’ didn’t even make it to the ‘Feast of the Epiphany’; ‘Blog in the Bog’ ended in a matter of days after I was hospitalised with hypothermia and frostbite on the Scottish Outer Hebrides Isle of North Uist & ‘I’ll Blog When You Find Me’ failed to even make a start when it became apparent that no-one was bothering to look for me. I’m never getting back those 4 months I spent in an abandoned squash court in Burnie in northern Tasmania.
What’s different this time around? Well, only time will tell. I’ve already taken 9 breaks in the first 300 words. The aim of ‘The Complete Perks of Damian Callinan’ is to use this forum as a tinkering shed to play around with new ideas that may end up as shows, books, screen projects or cult manifestos. I will also be sharing excessively embellished tour yarns, wantonly inaccurate anecdotes and will apply my trademark light touch to our planet’s inevitable descent into dystopia.
To ensure that I don’t immediately fail to meet your moderate expectations, I won’t be committing to any word count or weekly timetable. You might get a 3000 word rant about the paucity of basil leaves on Gourmet Buffalo Marguerita Pizzas or just a picture of a ferret wearing a hat. The best way for you to enjoy this blogletter is to truncate your hopes and be pleasantly surprised when it’s still appearing in your inbox in June.
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