I have been toying with the idea of creating a blog for some time now. A couple of things have held me back. Firstly, an inability to decide on a blog design and a lack of motivation to start coding it. Secondly, and probably more importantly, very little interest in writing.

I had dabbled with website design for over a decade when I made the decision to turn my hobby into a career. It was a bit worrying at first as, “what if writing code full time spoilt the enjoyment it gave me as a hobby?” I would be losing the freedom of designing what I wanted when I wanted and have to start working to someone else’s specification. As it turned out, I enjoyed, and continue to enjoy, this new career. Having the time to learn my chosen discipline well, has actually increased my enjoyment of it.

English (as in writing a story) is another story. And the story is, that it doesn’t come natural to me. At school, to cut a long story short, I didn’t like writing short stories. Usually you don’t like the things you’re not very good at. I found English lessons difficult. One term we read "a mid-summers night’s dream" and despite reading and studying the book in detail, I couldn’t tell you a single thing about it.

However, I do have one positive memory from my schoolboy English lessons. I remember one day, the teacher set us a test to learn 100 of the most commonly misspelt words. We had one week to learn them. Despite being one of the worst spellers in the class, I achieved 96 out of 100. I accomplished this feat by substituting my weak spelling skill with two other traits. Memorization and competitiveness. Then school ended and I didn’t have to read books or write essays anymore.

I wonce was a gloden speler

Next followed a long period in my life without literature.

In 2008, I had a brief literary reprise with my Poems on the Underground project. I would write poems during my 35 minute tube journey to work, taking inspiration from articles in all the discarded free newspapers that littered the carriages.

Later in the year, I visited the "For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond" exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in South London. Among the exhibits was a first edition Casino Royale novel. At that moment I realized that despite having watched all the James Bond films umpteen times I had never read any of the original novels. When I got home, I did some research and found that Pan Books published all 14 Bond books in the 1960’s in a paperback uniform series. This sounded ideal and I started searching on eBay right away.

My collection of Bond books

Working my way through this collection ignited my love of reading. As well as the bond books, I now have a couple of books on the go at any one time. And proper fiction books too, not just titles like "The Principles of Beautiful Web Design" or the "Adobe Type Library Reference".

So with my new found love of reading, I set about building a blog with a mission to write blog posts on a regular basis. If you’re reading this, it means I’ve succeeded at building the platform and I'm ready to start writing regular blog posts.

Wish me luck!