My writing hero is Hunter S Thompson.

Like many other people who scratch a living out of writing, I admired his total balls-out devotion to telling the truth. At least the truth that he saw. Not many people dare to do it.

He wrote this:

"The only other important thing to be said about Fear & Loathing is that it was fun to write, and that's rare — for me, at least, because I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work.

I suspect it's a bit like fucking — which is fun only for amateurs.

Old whores don't do much giggling.

Nothing is fun when you have to do it — over and over, again and again — or else you'll be evicted, and that gets old.

So it's a rare goddamn trip for a locked-in, rent-paying writer to get into a gig that, even in retrospect, was a kinghell, highlife fuck-all from start to finish... and then to actually get paid for writing this kind of manic gibberish seems genuinely weird.

So maybe there's hope. Or maybe I'm going mad..."

Yeah, and maybe there IS hope.

Although not fit to clean the dust from his hash-pipe, I agree with him and too often I find writing a ball-aching chore.

But I enjoy immensely writing this blog.

There is so much angst at present about BCUK and its strange band of followers, among whom I am proud to number myself.

But really it's a hopeless target to attack the medium.

Hunter would have relished, did relish, the instant response to his words.

If you can go to the bother - and have the belief - that people might be interested in something you have written and published on the internet, then I think you at least should have the courage of your convictions to defend it if called upon to do so.

Otherwise "publish" it in a diary at home and let it remain forever unsullied by anyone else's opinion or criticism.

Having said that, trolls and snarlers are one thing; geeks who have the fiendish ability to clone your blog and masquerade as you are something else and should be dragged across the town and beaten with whipchains.

And

"So much for Objective Journalism. Don't bother to look for it here — not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like sport scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms."