Death of the Author (And May He Stay That Way)

Picture 007 (200x150) I am currently going through my previous blog posts, so as to assign some tags to them. Prior to this, most of them were listed under the phenomenally useful “Uncategorized” category, or the deceivingly non-descriptive “General Posts” category.

General Posts. How can a post be a General Post? This thought amused me for a moment or two before I moved on to the next, far more interesting one.

If a post is about nothing, then it cannot be a post, can it?

General Posts, for me, was originally just a category to click at the last minute after having written a post and strongly disliking the concept of having a plethora of “Uncategorized” posts.

(The quotation marks are there because I am using the American spelling. I do not wish to confuse those who see the word “colour” in the same page as “Uncategorized.”)

In a few posts, I found some sentences which I would have liked to have written better. Some were linguistically iffy, some were grammatically stupid.

After a small amount of thought (that is, after all, the amount I am capable of without tangenting… er, where was I? Oh yes.) I decided that I would not, in fact, change them to the newer, grammatically superior wordings.

“But what, oh wondrous one, was your reasoning?” I hear you say. “Well,” I begin, before taking another mind-leap into another dimension: at this point I forget my train of thought.

In a nutshell, a section of writing is written by a person. I am sure you can grasp this.

The second piece of information which may be important for your understanding is the following:

People change.

They do, I swear! Their temperaments change, they become more this, less that; they find inspiration in a river, lose it in the lake, and find despair at the bottom of a bottle.

The link between these two microns of thought? The me writing this sentence is a dramatically different me from the one who wrote the last. Even more so the last post; even more so the Ethan Ramsey stories.

The author may be the same person technically but emotionally they are like two dramatically different peas in a pod.

So when I edit a previous post, I am not changing my own work. I am changing me-of-the-past’s work. A me who may have been emotionally unstable (and that is different how?), or rushed into making mistakes, or writing quickly to get an idea they are passionate about out of their system.

I do not dare change me-of-the-past’s work. I can’t ask him whether he meant what I think he meant or not, because he is no longer around. He is, so to say, dead.

Hence the link between the title of this post and the post of this post.

And now, the post-post of this post. (Epilogue)

I was distracted from my writing, bah. Never mind.

What else shall I write? I will probably post again some time today, I am in a webloggery mood today.

mentok1 Will I post something interesting?

Only Mentok will tell.

Oh.

I won’t post. Me-of-the-future will.

MIND-BREAKERY!

And after adding his images, the Maddened Man leaves, in a puff of smoke.