…only probably with more swearing and more caffeine.

The comics, tv, novel, and essay writer Warren Ellis makes a regular appearance in these blog pages, I guess. Along with China Mieville, Robert Macfarlane, Laurie Penny, Rebecca Solnit, Catherynne M. Valente and others, he’s one of a sort of constant circle of ‘omigod, how did they do that’ writers that I think with. It’s good to find other people playing in the same sandpit as you are – and it’s good, I think, to have living people you can admire. Shows that it can be done, scrobbling this creative life together out of wordscraps and notebooks and long-distance, glitchy Skype calls.

In particular, I’m thinking about his recent experiments with status updates – a daily ‘I AINT’NT DEAD YET!’ which could be pictures or updates or what have you. Short, tiny snapshots of a daily instance. If I were to get my act together to do something similar, these are the reasons wherefore:

• It’s minimal. Almost like a fake ghost-life. Not the full build out of a virtual life that you have in say, Facebook, but a shadow of the real that recognizes that it is a shadow, if that makes any sense to anyone but me.
• It’s like a tiny message in the bottle, every day.
• It’ll keep my singular, regular, and darling Googlecrawlerbot happy.
• I’d get to be arty. I always used to like the more personal status-y things you got in social media – far more so than the actual writing of the damn diary entries. Y’know the sort of thing: song-of-the-day, current-mood, currently-reading, status, etcetera. Ghosty throwaway stuff maybe, but makes the net seem a little less lonely.
• Brain attention capacity at 10% only.

So, while I think about it for a bit – here’s a snapshot of the sort of things I could say: