Firstly, a huge public thank you to the people of Wrekin Writers for encouragement, patient answering of questions with good humour and arranging this to link up with the Wrekin Writers website. All this advice one reads about starting to write says 'join a writers group' and it's absolutely the right (write) thing to do. Without the group I would have never have had the nerve to start a blog.

2. I think I want this blog to be a tool: a journal of how writing a blog helps me write other things. It's a bit like having a big pot of soup on the stove. I don't have time to dedicate a lot of time to writing and I have to write in small bits and pieces. So writing a blog more frequently feels like having a pot simmering - with what I'm going to write on the blog and - importantly - everything else - all the time (somewhere in the background of whatever else I'm doing), instead of having to re heat it again to boiling point every time I sit in front of the keyboard or pick up my fountain pen. So this is a journal of how I feel about blogging in terms of my writing rather than a public diary. It's also an exercise in desensitizing myself to exposure and to keep writing.

3. I found a marvellous inspiration in the Guardian this Saturday (Review, 4th July, 2009). It's Alice Munro (aged seventy, by the way), saying how good it is (and how good she finds it) if "you've still got life up for translation ... you're always fooling around with what you find, not so much interested in its usefulness as in transformations and revelation.' I'd like to think that's what writing is about. Especially for me is the "fooling around'; taking every day things / events / scraps of overheard conversation and turning them around into a story, making a narrative that might mean something, something that might grab a reader to make them think differently. Or perhaps to try to transform the ordinary into an extraordinary experience for the reader.

That's it for my second blog. Time to lock the cats up for the night.