Have a Herring Sandwich

My writing most of the time is like making herring sandwiches with a few artfully arranged cucumbers and radish roses. Different styles of writing look like food to me, and right now I want to write about something different from herring sandwiches. Maybe a chocolate meringue tarte with cacao liqueur in the whipped cream filling?

I never know which metaphors are shared with others and which are the lonely monsters only inhabiting my cobwebby brain. So I try them out on this here blog and then listen very hard, to hear either some response or silence, which is also a response. Though a tricky one to interpret, because it could be that I just fell flat on my face or it could be that all the readers fainted or perhaps there were no readers but Silence.

Nothing is quite as tricky as trying to write with humor, because what I find funny and obviously meant as a joke sometimes comes across as an earnest argument in writing. Then I have egg my face and still nobody laughs. At other times I find things funny that I know nobody else would find funny at all and if I were at all in my right mind I wouldn't put them in writing. But sometimes I do.

Do you know how hard writing humor is? It is about a million times harder than writing neutrally and that, in turn, is about a million times harder than writing a tear-jerker, for me, at least. But humor is one of those lifeboats that keep us from drowning on this long voyage across the stormy sea and tear-jerkers just add more water to the waves.

How did I get to stormy seas from herring sandwiches? Well, there is a connection, of a sort. But mostly this is just a writing exercise.