A recap and fuller explanation (of what this blog is about)

Good morning crowing creepy Crowd (of one).

OK, that sounds a little cynical and a little unself-confident. For all I know there could be thousands of you out there (in the ether) soaking up all these words of wisdom and I doubt any of you are "creepy" but I do love alliteration and I preferred creepy to crazy or crawly or Crawley.

Concentrate, Tim - tell them what you want to say and stop faffing around ...

Well, for a start, this is a novelty, sitting here as I had previously for so many early mornings, over months of ill-health, tapping away - but there's been a gap, whilst I got somewhat better and slept through the night. Despite that good news, I missed my enjoyably isolated hours alone tapping away on the large-screen laptop waiting for it to BSD [Blue Screen of Death]. I seem, mostly to have solved that technical issue which one would hope I could after many years in I.T.

I think it is time to re-explain what this blog is all about or at least what I think it is all about:

• It's not themed (particularly) but I don't think, at least, that it is what one of my sons describes as my "brain dump" which in some ways is a good phrase but in others rather crude perhaps.
• Those observant visitors to this blog would have noticed some time back that the URL (the web address) is different from the header or title (well, subtly different) and that's because for a while I was using my blog also to advertise some items for sale and the address of: Best Seller Before I Die? smacked of me being a salesman rather than a writer. Thus the title ended up as Best Selling Author Before I Die?
• It was intended to be a companion to my writing and thus focused on my writing but it morphed a bit into something that started to have a mind of its own and I was just the instrument (the typist). I suppose it was my mind producing the posts but sometimes it felt rather as though I was the servant of someone else. I certainly had a job to type as quickly as (whoever) was churning-out the prose or post content.
• So, it can still live up to being primarily about my writing; but only just by a short head, to use an equestrian term.
• In the background, frankly, I guess unknown to blog readers, I am writing, if, as ever, not as regularly as I should. I have a primary book about half-written and a few others at various stages of completion. I also have a plethora of short stories, almost all completed and I plan to amalgamate them into one or more anthologies in due course.
• In conclusion, I suppose this blog has become something between a diary of events, my opinions, some news or current affairs or just things that I am interested in. Obviously one hopes that others may share my interest.

Today, as I used to, I awoke early (4.30 a.m.) and the improving so-called frozen shoulder hurt a bit, along with the fact that I seem to have 'put my back out'. I think the latter is from shock rather than any overwork as I had neglected domesticity (home DIY tasks) for so long that when I returned to doing my bit my body made some kind of protest.

It's almost Bonfire night and I miss my many bonfires that I had in our farmyard (usually accompanied by a bottle of ale). We have to get by with just a large oil drum incinerator on the go now as the former concrete area (for bonfires and horse poo) was grassed over and a new well-placed poo pile area was built. There's something very lovely about bonfires:

• The smell and how it gets in your clothes. The best smells being from burning damp leaves.
• The warmth.
• The differing flickering flames of various colours depending on what infiltrations there were in the items burning.
• The ever-changing shadows caused by the flames.
• The emotions generated by that camp-fire notion that suggests, even alone, one has the company of many camp followers that are joining in with the beer-supping and imaginary banter.

Time to write a short story and post it - just so anyone out there knows that I write ...