Ice me bro!

Growing up in a family of five was a challenge. Even though we all hatched a minute apart and fed on the same festering carrion, it was always about Rooney. No, not that neckless worthless untalented egomanaical mughead who keeps limping off the pitch. Rooney was the first in the Raptor family to graduate from the Dikaios Institute for Lambent Dinosaurs, Oregon. While my own alma mater did plenty to advance my growth as a vicious predator with an inclination towards African art, college life was tough. Alcohol was the easy way out and spelt doom for my third liver, but I did alright. A time and a place for everything, Dad said, even if that referred to my face in a puddle of regurgitated sheep.

Some precocious teenagers turn to writing, and are caught in the twilight zone of texting-on-the-blog about shit no one cares about. And so we meet today's victim, Jon Morgan. Jon authors "Me vs College" - The life and times of Jon Morgan. Now, a byline like that belongs either to a Wodehouse book, or someone completely fictional, but life is never that simple.

I looked around and thought to myself holy cow - this guy can write. Endlessly, that is. Scrolling past his latest post took me more time than Rooney's god-damn thesis defense. Ever heard of thumbnails Jon? Let's talk aesthetics a bit. Your background is a bit vanilla, but I'll take that over frightening fit inducing graphics any day. Think about widening your body column a bit, widescreens were invented 10 years ago. Tabbed navigation and clean archives is a good start, but what the hell are all the buttons for? Your sidebar is obscenely crowded and negates all the cleanliness in your template. You and your blog are all readers want to see on your blog . Here's a hint - stop whoring out to get referral hits. Write your ass off, visit blogs that matter and the visitors will follow.

Alright, we're done with the potatoes and gravy, how about some meat? You overuse strikethroughs. Several posts consist of fake dialogue. Memes from 4chan, how original. And when you're not blogging about blogging, or the lack of it, you're celebrating pointless anniversaries. Who does monthly anniversaries? That's more annoying than yuppie parents celebrating their kid's "6-month birthday". And pages upon pages of those retarded quizzes. Fuck it, I'm going to stop linking now.

Look Jon, there's not a whole lot a college senior can write about, we get that. But stop posting shit for the sake of it. I simply don't get the point behind most of your posts, it gets worse than livejournal at times. Memes get old on /b/ in a heartbeat, why the fuck would you waste your readers' time with them? I see a young man trying to find a voice, a direction - in life, not just on your blog. That's good, but stop trying so damn hard. You go from blue-eyed college kid to forced-arrogant-dipshit in the space of 4 lines. I was drawn into this, but that annoying douche who keeps saying "chums" took over.

Find a line between quality and quantity and stick to it. No one's going to freak out if they don't hear from you in 2 weeks. Wait 24 hours before you publish, read your post a couple of times before you do. Take care of the little things - don't call something profound or funny, let your audience decide. And for fucks sake stop using "lol jk", do you plan to type your resume like that?

College is fun, idiotic and more. Sex is the not only thing you'll discover so hang in there and use your voice for something that matters.

For a clean template, and for showing promise, 2.5 stars.

In Which a Clown Is Made to Feel Old

Ahoy there, my little loin chops! Seem to have skipped a week or so, I’m afraid. Eurovision happened and the larks spread somewhat. We came last, of course. Terribly cunning. We’ve already saddled ourselves with the Olympics – we’d have to mortgage Wales to host Eurovision as well. I lost my poor Fanny in all the excitement, and I didn’t find her yesterday morning. She had somehow managed to get herself buried neck-deep in the antirrhinums. I have no recollection of the incident, but I will own that my fingernails seemed muddier than usual.

In my current state of advanced toxicity it seems unjust that I should have to review the blog of a fresh-faced young woman who is years away from the legal drinking age. Of course, there are a great many people who would say that I shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near any fourteen-year-olds, under any circumstances, and they are probably right, but Andrea has submitted herself for review and I must do right by her. I fear this may be a lengthy endeavour. Refill your glasses now.

Andrea writes a blog called Another Amphigory. She describes herself as “Just another fourteen year old girl writing about Vonnegut, knitting, grammar and the stuff under my bed”. She has only been blogging since the beginning of this year, and it did not take me long to read every last one of her entries.

Andrea, cherub, I know you are only fourteen, but I’m not going to pull any punches here. If you are big enough to read this site, you are big enough to be treated like everybody else. I will have to admit that the first page of your blog is not very appealing. There are some photos of you, a couple of brief snippets and - my personal bugbear - a list of things that you did but are too tired to write about. The last post on the first page talks about how you are struggling for content, how you want to go back to writing little vignettes about your life, as that is when you feel your writing is strongest. Yet after that, you seem to decide to start publishing daily pictures of yourself, and then you stop doing that, too, and then you stop posting altogether.

Looking back through your archives, your content is markedly uneven. You post song lyrics and recipes and the kind of guff I could find under any internet rock I cared to pick up. It is as though you are just hurling content at your blog in the hopes that it will become more than the sum of its parts, and this is a shame, because I think you are far, far better than that.

Andrea, I believe you have a lot of nascent talent. I have been waiting to read a blog that contained a line that made me stop to savour, and your line about unpicking the embroidery on your pillow said so much in such an elegant manner that I did just that. I agree that your writing is strongest when you are writing your little snapshots. You have a way of pinning a moment to cork that is lacking in a lot of the ‘adult’ writers I read online. However, don’t be afraid of expanding on these little toothfuls. There is more to be said, and relish to be had in the saying of it.

You talk about your blog as though it was a journal, but it isn’t one, not really. Keep a journal under your mattress to vent to, by all means, but put only your very best work online. Think long and hard about what you are going to write and then write it as well as you possibly can. It may seem private at times, like there’s nobody reading, but there are still standards that you should try and retain. Especially now you’ve gone and shown your ‘journal’ to all these big, bad people.

Throughout your blog you mention being worried that people you know are reading your work, and this makes you feel unable to write honestly about certain matters. I would suggest that if you think this for one moment you should immediately up sticks and start writing somewhere you are sure you are anonymous. It is sometimes pleasant to think of people we know reading our work and being astonished by our brilliance, but it is much, much more important to both your readers and yourself that you feel you can be honest.

I understand that it’s hard to think of things to say, especially when one feels like one is shouting into a void. Sometimes, in my own personal writings, I look at the blank page in front of me and feel as though every thought I have ever had has been sucked out of my head like my Fanny hoovers out a Cadbury’s Creme Egg. When I get stuck like this I sometimes find it helpful to pick a thing at random and just try to write about it in the best way I can. You can make a magnum opus out of a tin of Spam if you put your mind to it, especially if, like you, you have a cunning eye for detail and a pretty way with words.

Sometimes, though, nothing helps. The muse professes a headache and goes to bed early with Danielle Steele and you need to find inspiration in another source. So, take that post you wrote when you were too tired to write anything properly. There were ten items on it. Take each of those and sum them up in two hundred words or so. Et voila! Your first ten posts. Or show me New York – I cannot comprehend what it must be like to be a fourteen-year old with easy access to New York City. My, what carnage I could have caused. The School was ten miles from the nearest sweet shop and the penalties for escape were harsh.

In conclusion, Andrea, I think you should treat Another Amphigory as a practise run. Kill it dead and plunder its corpse, take away all the juiciest organs and leave the rest for the dogs. Then set yourself up in a plush new home and write like I believe you can. You should treat your blog as though it were a strange baby you birthed through your brain. Feed it well and keep it safe from banality.

And Andrea, if you do relocate, I would be very pleased if you would email me with your new address. I would like to keep track of you, in the least upsetting way I know how.

I am going to give you two and a half stars, for now, but I think that in the future, you could come back and bag a few more.