Blogs are about - and by that I mean that my blog is about - a certain kind of deception. It gives the illusion of talking nonsense, when it's clearly highly processed. Or to put it another way, it pretends to offer autobiography when it presents nothing of the sort.

Trust me. If I were to write an autobiographic work, it'd feature almost nothing mentioned here. With the possible exception of scenes of Nightclub debauchery.

All right. It'd feature nothing but nightclub scenes of debauchery. Sue me.

(Spot the influence, lit-kids. I've just finished reading Charles Bukowski's Women which I stole out of Chrissy's car on the way back from Ross' party, and it's swiftly cemented itself in my top ten favourite books. If I'm John Walker's bad influence, this is mine. He writes about sex like Ellroy writes about crime. Last night, when the gathering had whittled down to a few brave souls, I did a reading from it and despite my lack of talent in public speaking, nailed it. It speaks to me, and through me and lots of other phrases ending in "me".)

What I'm saying is that this isn't the blog post I intended to write. I spent so much time busily composing that in my head on the bus and back from Bristol, and it grew to such a stupendous length, that I haven't really the strength of will and sit to hammer it all out. In other words, this is blog is actually about process - I sat and worked out what I meant to say, and what I meant by that. When I say "Work Blog", it's more that I'm talking about a scratch sheet. It's an epiphenonemon of me doing shit and thinking rather than something directly linked to it as cause and effect.

So while I won't be writing it here currently, I'm now secure in what I was going to write in response to Andrew Wheeler's comments over at the V that Sandman was always "an indulgent exercise in creative writing that just happened to find its only willing publisher in a comics company". Of course, Wheeler is a deliberately prickly commentator on comics, but I thought it worthwhile taking his comments on face level and see where it took me. And it wandered around my obsessions with Outsider Art, how the application of one of my favourite techniques - multiple, conflicting paradigms and/or definitions to illustrate separate areas- when discussing comics may prove fruitful and noting that people who treat comics just as movies are just as ill-guided as those who treat it as novels. And there's far more who lean towards that end of the spectrum than Gaiman's more literary approach.

Another time.