All The Things I Never Said

By Serdar Yegulalp on 2018-06-09 08:00:00-04:00 No comments

Readers of this blog would have no way of knowing, unless I came out and told them, how much of what I write for it actually goes live. I will now spill some beans on that score: What you see here is the tippy-tip of a very large iceberg of blogging. But you're not missing much, because the rest of it simply isn't fit for public consumption.

Roughly one-third of what I throw out is ranting. I sit down, fuming about something or other, and I type two paragraphs that drip with such venom that they threaten to clog the keyboard. In fact, they do: I get about two 'grafs in, and realize nobody, certainly not me, wants to read a meltdown or a cri de coeur unless there's something more to it than yelling at clouds. So into the trash it goes.

Another third or so are ideas that never develop past a couple of words. Blame that on the way I generate material for this blog. Sometimes I'll open a new post, jot something down that's meant to be the point of entry into a larger discussion of an issue, and then completely lose the thread. Very occasionally, I can re-thread that thread into a new needle; right now, there's a post with the working title "read old books!" that is in this vein. But most of the time, there's no bringing it back.

About another third are rambles that start well, and maybe have a useful idea or two in them, but augur into a wall somewhere along the way. I leave them as-is, and save the pieces. Sometimes they can be lifted out intact and recycled into a new post that develops that particular idea properly.

But on the very large whole, what you see is what you get. When I'm dead, they're not going to find a treasure trove of unpublished material from me. At least, not for my blog. They will find the workbooks I have in progress for novels, assuming they can ever decipher the damn things. Half the time I can't myself.