Hello. It’s been a while.

Not that anyone’s been waiting with baited breath for my return.  Even with over 600 subscribers and more than 150,000 views, the total number of referrers to my website from any of my YouTube videos since the beginning of time is eight. As it turns out, the probability of somebody actually clicking any of the links to my website in any of my videos is near enough zero. Assuming this proportion would be higher was mistake number one.

Mistake number two: thinking anyone cared about what I had to say. Though they’ve been purged from public display, I still have every post since 2013 saved here. Nothing ever garnered much attention. Will it be any different this time? Perhaps.

I built this website as a platform to share my creative work, but in the internet shouting contest everyone’s doing the same, and often far more effectively. The fact of the matter is nobody on the planet cares about what I write except me. This is a hard truth to accept for prospective authors. There’s some absolute garbage out there. Trust me — I wrote some of it. The memory of self-publishing my earliest attempts at novels rears its embarrassingly ugly head every now and then. Even at their best, my delusions about their quality were astounding. Did I really believe a novel about a secret agency’s quest to find and destroy all cabbage-based weaponry was a good idea? What about that highly derivative attempt at a time travel saga, featuring male Mary Sue and generic evil scientist #4097?

Have I sullied my reputation? No. That’s the great thing about not having anyone listening — you get a free clean slate every time.

And if I’m honest, I still quite like a few of the ideas from my previous wayward attempts. Yes, some were blatantly stolen from Back to the Future or Doctor Who (and, as it turns out, I managed to copy a significant amount of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure without having actually seen it), but there are other things I’m genuinely still proud of. I know it’s a long shot, and I know I’m telling myself all the same things I told myself with The Cabbage Intelligence Agency and Clocks, but I’m hopeful that Operation Green Canary can be something great. Right now it isn’t. The ideas are there, and on occasion the prose rises to match it, but there’s still a mountain to climb. I just need to be careful it doesn’t end up as a James Bond clone.

Composing has perhaps been a little more successful so far. Thank you to everybody who listens to and enjoys my music. It feels amazing to read comments from people telling me they’d use my music in their own videos, or that listening made them lie down and contemplate life. Unfortunately this recognition has come almost exclusively from my involvement with Thrive. It’s not hard to work out why my original music unrelated to Thrive gets very few views in comparison to dedicated Thrive themes, and from a purely selfish point of view this is disappointing.

Admittedly I’ve been doing almost nothing to promote myself outside of Thrive. That should change in the near future as I expand into freelance composition for indie developers, but this too has pitfalls. Even more so than aspiring novelists, the internet is littered with people who make music, and much of the time it’s scary how good someone can be without having any recognition whatsoever. Despite how ashamed of my early works I am, I’m glad I’ve had the experience. I really don’t know whether I can be considered good enough to get paid for what I do, but I guess I’ll just have to find out. And if that fails, I’ll keep improving and try again.

I still don’t know if a website is entirely useful at this stage, but I have one and I intend to use it.

The difficulty is finding the right way to present myself online. Within Thrive, this is easy — I’m the outspoken one who makes music, tells people what to do and feels creepily authoritative thanks to the condescending image of Beethoven I have as my profile picture. I assure you this is far from what I’m like in real life.

As my own entity, what do I want my public image to be? Should I be be super-awesome-wacky-random-zany-man-with-an-odd-camel-obsession? Probably not. I’m not particularly funny in person, so trying to be online will only end up exploding in my face. At the same time, drearily telling nobody in particular about myself is sure to tell people I’m generic self-promoting internet person #4097. I’m not the best at listing my successes anyway. Writing my about page made my skin crawl, and I’m still not happy with it (at least it’s better than its predecessor…shiver). I’ll aim for a happy medium, wherever that might be. The only way to find out is to actually write things here and promote them. I just hope I understand what I’m doing here before I gather a large enough audience to prevent me going back…because that’s obviously going to happen…

So, in summary, I’m back. None of you noticed, but here I am. And I’m going to write things, and compose things, and promote myself, and not be quite so naively juvenile this time.

And because none of you care for anything other than Thrive anyway, my first proper post will be about Thrive. How does that sound?