Just Another WordPress Blog, by Patrick White*

Just what the fuss might be is beyond me. Beyond thin gods in charge of gates. So I have decided. For Goodreads complaints about boredom and mud distress not by personal offence. But idiocy. No wish to bore, quite the opposite. If looking for variety is a crime I am here to confess.

Mediocrity and guilt and anonymous death. Lonely and humiliated, wrong. Were I to admit such drizzle would that make me a better writer? Just a wet head. So I would gain the approving digital socialites but lose my soul. A short novel, an appealing character, a social situation unexplored before. And I would die, hatless. An honest admission would trap imagination like a mouse and a smear of peanut butter my reward. Yet I would make lovely sense.

Those confessions I confess lie beyond this poor fellow. Because light and life remain to me I will deny the admission short, declarative sentences declare. Active verbs. Page turning. Economy. So to silence. So to peace. To that good night.

Only the one confession for me.

—

*Should you take the time to actually read reviews of Patrick White on Goodreads you might find it hard to see why he has taken offence. (If that is what he has done. If it is White.) Yet quite a number of readers with whom I discuss his work have a low tolerance for it. Perhaps after all many Goodreads reviewers don’t say anything if they have nothing good to say. (And to tell the truth Patrick White never really reads Goodreads. Perhaps he stumbled across some writers’ self-help site and is confused, being dead.)