A perfectly valid question that could be answered with a brief Why not?
But, as you’ll gather if you venture into the following pages you’ll understand that brevity isn’t Hughesy’s strong suit. So, again, Why?
Well, for a start, because I can. I’ve got the time, the energy, the inclination and it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.
Second, because it dovetails into the way I spend my days. Now I’m out of the work force, I fill my time reading, in both hard copy and digital formats. writing, listening in an exclusively digital environment since I’ve got a music library of around thirty-five thousand tracks at my fingertips and sampling the odd glass of interesting wine.
Various other activities drag me away from the office, but from the time I rise, somewhere between four and six in the morning until the time I retire for the night I’m generally somewhere within earshot of the office stereo, driven from the desktop computer. That makes it easy to record impressions of what I’ve read, heard and tasted, and, in any case, I’m spending a lot of time in the act of composition.
The results of the writing process need some avenue of publication, and the invariable response to the news that I’ve almost completed my second novel is an Are you getting it published?
I’m not inclined to run around doing all the things involved in publishing a hard copy of Dirty Work at the Crossroads or The Real Australia. There would probably be some amount of financial outlay involved, and I’d have to do something about marketing so you can add a third answer to the Why?
Because it allows me a very basic publishing outlet.
More than anything else, it gives me a chance to keep track of what I’ve read, listened to and sampled, and when we head off on a journey somewhere the resulting travelogue and photo journals are obvious grist to a website mill.