Its better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self - Cyril Connolly

I spent the better part of last evening amalgamating various old blogs of mine into this one. Why did I put myself through that? Well considering that it took me the best part of an hour to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress thanks to a dodgy plugin I thought I’d deleted months ago and the inability for my install to successfully import the blogs correctly at first I really did start to wonder myself.

Over the years I’ve picked subjects I’ve had an interest in and started various blogs to explore them. I never thought I’d get a following but after watching many writers, and for some I call them that out of sheer politeness, gain a loads of readers I wondered where I was going wrong. I tried the various circle jerk sites like Entrecard to get new readers and all I got was warnings from my web host about my traffic being to high for my package. If I was lucky I received a very veiled attempt at self promotion in the form of a comment designed from the start to make it look like they had actually read my post. I just didn’t get where these bloggers were getting their readership from.

When my RPG blog joined the RPG Bloggers Network it’s traffic didn’t so much as jump through the roof as gave me a slight boost but those that came to the site actually read my posts and I was very lucky in that a lot of people took the time to comment on my writing and I’ve got to know a lot of folk through it but at the end of the day this blog gets only a handful of visitors a day. It’s a personal blog so I don’t expect much but if I was to tell you that almost every day around 80% of my page views are for the Malteser Cake recipe I posted months ago you’ll see where my angst comes from.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I need validation or acceptance when I write but I certainly want someone to have read it. Over the years my writing has changed and it’s not just the spelling that has improved but I always feel that I’m always grasping for things to say. If I have an idea for something to write about I’ll then spend four hours struggling to put the words together. Whether that’s my dyslexia showing through I don’t know but it certainly shows with anything I rush. I joined in a conversation a friend of mine was having on Facebook today and no matter what I typed it felt as though I was digging a deeper hole with every sentence. For those curious it was a discussion on why people were being so upset about horses dying in the Grand National when loads of animals die every day for our needs and desires. He is a vegetarian and I’m a conscientious meat eater so we’re never going to agree on the basics but I found I really struggled to put together an argument for my view point. I know why I believe the things I do but could I get anything writing down other than, and I’m paraphrasing here, ‘I’ve got grindy teeth and choppy teeth so I’ll use them for what they are meant for’? Needless to say I don’t think I came out of that battle with to many hit points left. On a side note I need to learn more about basic punctuation I feel…

I just took a couple of minutes there to check if my wife had updated her blog before going to sleep and reread her latest post. I’ll hold my hands up and say that because it’s got a lot of crafty posts I tend not to click the links but this time I did. Can you guess what the first link was about? This exact same topic!

Everything I write is there for the general public to see. I don’t mark anything as private for my eyes only. Maybe I should do that? I don’t know. You only have to look at the varied and many categories in the sidebar to see just how far I wander at times. The only brand I’m pushing is me and aside from friends and family I don’t really see who would actually care about what I write. I love to write though.

My written English skill levels are always a major fear for me when I put something out there even if only a handful of people will actually ever see it. It’s not just my writing skills that are out to stop me actually writing though. In my days of writing for Wired’s Geekdad blog I enjoyed every second of it but seeing the level these guys take their hobbies to really intimidates me and so any time I come up with a topic to write about I end up dropping it as they would either be far more qualified to write it or already have. Why even try and write a smart blog post on something topical when someone else out there will be able to do it far better than I can. On here my answer would be that I’d try because in the grand scheme of things noone would see it. Add possibly a few hundred thousand readers and I’ll shrink back into my dark corner and let someone else give it a try.

For those that haven’t guessed yet this is one of my rambles that like my earlier discussion on Facebook isn’t actually going the way I originally intended. I’m grasping at a point but never quite getting there. I can almost guarantee I’ll wake up in four hours time in a eureka moment with a way to make this more structured, readable and to the point but that in itself completely misses the point of this post.

I’m getting a huge feeling of deja vu with this posts…

The past few days have been hellishly hard work. At the beginning of the week Vonnie went to see the doctor who told her among other things she had a viral ear infection which was causing her headaches and sore throats. On Wednesday night Vonnie had trouble breathing and collapsed meaning she ended up with the paramedics out and a trip to A&E in the back of an ambulance. It turns out she has a really bad case of tonsillitis and has been put on a pile of drugs to get her better.

This morning we woke up and for the first time in about a week Vonnie actually felt positive about the day and was able to get up and not be in that much pain. Our respective parents were popping in to see the kids so we planned a relatively quiet day once we’d tidied the living room up a bit. Then the parents arrived and our son turned from a happy wee boy into this.

He’s excitable. He’s noisey. He won’t do a damn thing he’s told. And that’s before he even gets anywhere near the sweets. Even when he’s not fighting for his grandparents attention he is loud without an off switch. He talks to himself or when he’s alone he’ll just whitter random noises but there certainly isn’t an off switch. He becomes that hard work that Vonnie was completely and utterly shattered by the time our parents left to go home and it’s been a constant battle with him for the rest of the evening.

His speech therapy assessment went really well. Apparently problem cases are flagged if they have something like more than three percent of their normal chat being effected by stutters, stammers or repetition. I think Nairn comes in at just over two percent so they don’t see it as a major problem but he’s to go back in five months for a check. He’s got so many things going on that check of boxes for autism, ADHD and dyslexia that I don’t know if it’s just my parental desire for there to be nothing wrong that makes me think it’s just a kid thing. From getting my own ‘diagnosis’ with regards to dyslexia last year I know that if any of them do turn out to be a problem for him none of them are severe enough to really cause him much bother but it would allow us to target those problems to help him and ourselves.

I guess time will tell.

I’ve been reading up on my rights with regards to dyslexia in the workplace and anything and everything else I can think off that may be an issue. With the ‘severity’ of my problem if I was to go to nightschool or back to university I’d be able to apply for a disability allowance and I noticed a few of the other things that people can claim for depending on the disability.

One of the things they can claim for is a non-medical helper who would help with note taking and various other things the person may have problems with. When I found out that they can claim up to £20k+ for a salary for this non-medical helper I turned to my wife…

Bob: Here…these folk make more than I do and all they do is take notes and stuff. £20k for sitting through classes and doing what you would normally do as a student isn’t bad.
Vonnie: Yup it’s pretty good isn’t it. Things must have changed from when I was at uni though as they used to be called enablers.
Bob: I think we should just quite our jobs and start being non-medical helpers. What do you think?
Vonnie: Bob… Your dyslexic.
Bob: Oh yeah. I forgot about that.

To follow up from my previous entry. In short yes I am.

I always thought I had a problem. Nothing major. My spelling was never great and getting my thoughts across on paper was always a problem. They were things I could live with until I started having to complete application forms at work and really struggled. It wasn’t so much the writing but getting my head around the guidance and the competency framework.

Anyway as I mentioned in the previous post on this subject I booked myself in to be tested with some financial help from my work. The test went great but we weren’t sure just what the outcome of the test was going to be. I didn’t quite fit the new definition of dyslexic but the psychologist was going to process the tests and see what came out. I was very surprised by just how split it was.

My scores on the IQ test were a surprise to say the least.

• Verbal Scale – 96 percentile
• Performance Scale – 96 percentile
• Verbal Comprehension – 99 percentile
• Perceptual Organisation – 99.9 percentile
• Working memory – 77 percentile
• Processing Speed – 5 percentile

That’s a huge gap!

The rest of the test backed that up although it’s not as bad as it actually sounds. Apparently it puts me in the Severe Dyslexia bracket but this is a measure of the discrepancy between my general ability an literacy skills. Someone might not have as large a difference but have far more problems than I do.

I’ve had very brief conversations on Twitter with @Tregenza, a fellow RPG blogger, about all this as he suffers from Dyslexia as well. Yesterday he mentioned that it must be odd to be diagnosed with Dyslexia as an adult as he found out when he was 10 years old and so has had time to learn to deal with it. I don’t really know how to answer that.

Not knowing any different means I don’t have a yard stick to base it on as it’s not as if my mind worked perfectly fine until one morning I woke up and I struggled to deal with various things. Looking back I can see where my specific problems have held me back during my education. I can see where my problems lie at work as well but to be honest I’m not sure, given the job I actually do, if there is anything that can be done to improve. I can certainly give reports and applications a major overhaul now that I can get help with them in whatever way is necessary but as my job is 99% processing payments on our accounting systems I don’t suffer that badly whilst doing the actual job.

I’ve been given an ultimatum though by my wife. Things may be changing over the next year or two. I’ll post news on that as and when it happens though as it’s that huge it might take a lot of careful planning.

For years I’ve thought it and for years my doctor has hinted at it but they’ve never thought it was anything worth chasing up. Then I had to start completing application forms for work thanks the governments job cuts. To cut a long story short between my doctor, an adult literacy worker and the welfare officer at my work I was sent to be tested for dyslexia today.

So how ‘well’ did I do? To be honest I’m not entirely sure. Thanks to the body to oversees the psychologists changing their rules a while ago it doesn’t look as though I’ll be classed as dyslexic in the traditional sense. As I understand it to be called dyslexic you now need to have two or more of the categories your tested on score below the national average and fit the profile. In my case my memory skills are low enough to be below this average but the other indicator that I tested low on sits just on the average. Where my problems lie with this one is that almost all the other categories I was tested against had me in the top 1-2 percentiles so although it was average it was a significant drop from the rest of my scores. There was also a problem in that it is an amalgamation of two tests. On the mental arithmetic I scored 100% and almost completely failed the other which gave the middle of the road average.

So there is a definite specific learning disability there but the woman who went through the test with me is trying to work out whether she can technically diagnose me as dyslexic or not. Either way I’ll get the written report in about a week so we’ll see what she has managed to come up with then.