Everything must have a beginning, to speak in Sanchean phrase; and that beginning must be linked to something that went before.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

A blank page is often the biggest hurdle to writing. In the case of this blog, even getting to a blank page proved tricky. Not one for simple decisions, I spent a time considering a starting point for my blog, especially the name. While “Convergence” sounds a bit too ostentatious it accurately conveys the types of posts I want to write, and what I want to write about. Almost every piece of media is a convergence of different ideas, different points of view and different intentions. My main intent in choosing this name is to give me the freedom to choose what to write about, to not be pigeonholed into a particular type of text.

Having little to no experience with WordPress, besides a brief attempt at a blog as a computer science assignment, I needed a reference point. As the quote I chose would suggest, the idea behind this blog is linked to something that came before.

Once the name for this site had been chosen, I needed to find a design or theme that I liked. I must admit that seeing the recent redesign of the Verge, with its emphasis on a home feed and more blog-like posts, had a huge influence on my colour palette. My blog name could even be considered a nod to the impact the redesign had on my own site, as I settled on it after reading about the updated look to their site. I still have work to do to get the site where I want it, but at least it’s a start.

As it stands, I have no set plan for how often to write posts, or what to write about. Given my interest in Victorian detective fiction, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a post about an adaptation of a Holmes story, or even more recent mystery narratives. I have written essays in the past on links between game narratives and the texts we studied throughout a module, an idea I could see myself return to here. Rather than write a 3,500 word essay on the links between Daniel Defoe’s ‘A Journal of the Plague Year‘ and ‘The Forgotten City’ (2021), a murder-mystery set in a Roman city with peculiar ideas on law and order, I could write a short blog post that I could then expand upon at any time, either within or without this blog. No matter what I decide to do, it will inevitably involve different ideas coming together to form new ideas and conclusions. It will all be about convergence.