A Pooh guide to blogging

While I usually avoid talking or even thinking entirely consciously about this, it often strikes me (usually when I don't find anything to blog about) how strange it is that for five-plus years I've managed, FWIW, to come up with a post idea about six days out of seven.  More often than not, this just happens while I'm reading something (something doesn't add up, or reminds me of something else that doesn't seem entirely arbitrary), but sometimes it's a matter of mood, or caffeine: it feels like something is about to catch.

When it's the latter, my repetitive mind -- not so much a lizard brain as a perpetual child brain -- usually throws up a line from Winnie-the-Pooh "he felt singy." Here is that jewel in its setting (House at Pooh Corner, Ch. 6):

One day, when Pooh was walking towards this bridge, he was trying to make up a piece of poetry about fir-cones, because there they were, lying about on each side of him, and he felt singy.

So he picked a fir-cone up, and looked at it, and said to himself, "This is a very good fir-cone,
and something ought to rhyme to it." But he couldn't think of anything.  And then this came into his head suddenly:

Here's a myst'ry
About a little fir-tree.
Owl says it's his tree,
And Kanga says it's her tree.

'Which doesn't make sense,' said Pooh, 'because Kanga doesn't live in a tree.

Blog posts ain't poems, for sure. But..."There they were, lying about on each side of him, and he felt singy." That's  how it is, I suspect, for anyone who writes something new most days. Or some days.

In fact the Pooh books are peppered with snapshots about the creative process. I won't say that that's all that Pooh is about -- it's about safety, and friendship, and pleasure, and putting up patiently with a good deal of foolishness. But it's all in the context of creative play, which generates all those pleasures. Catches, them, stores them. In honeypots.

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