So.

As with most occasions in my life that have involved doing something ridiculous/counter-intuitive/potentially bloody painful, a tipping point was reached.

I was most definitely not going to write a blog, no matter how much I was tempted. I have a second novel to publish, I’m arse-deep in assignments for an MA in Creative Writing, and then there’s the day job and the how-the-fuck-do-I-single-parent challenge, and…

Yeah.

But I’d started to think about it. That was the problem. Composing posts in my head, making scrawled notes in margins of work notebooks… So I shoved it to the back of my mind for a few months, but the words just started shouting louder.

And then came that tipping point. When I was discussing the whole blog ridiculousness with a friend he used my own advice against me, the complete rat-bastard: “Put the voices down on paper.”

Sigh.

Naturally, my brain processed this as a dare, because there is a part of me that is forever ten years old and still well up for licking a battery if someone dares me to, and also this is something I regularly tell people who say they want to write but don’t know where to start and I cannot therefore be revealed as a hypocrite.

And here we are.

What’s this blog going to be about? It should have a cohesive theme, naturally. Fortunately I have that covered. There’s the obvious, of course: the elephant in the room that triggered the word-whispering in the first place, aka that Dead Husband thing (I’ll warn you in advance when that one’s coming up – you may want to leaf through a Reader’s Digest instead…). And writing about writing, naturally, especially my own brand of dark fuckery. And feminism – can’t leave that out –  and the best fights I’ve ever been in, and my intimate relationship with gin. Ooh, and being a geek with high-functioning Aspergers and how I wouldn’t change a thing about it. And parenting. Definitely parenting. Or not-parenting, as is often the case. Maybe a bit of kink, once I’ve figured out how to classify it. See? Cohesive as all hell.

All that remains right now is to welcome you to Scrawling in the Margins. I can honestly say I have no idea what will come next, but that’s life in general and we’ve all made it this far…