Even though I tend to go missing here sometimes, I know a break of just over four months probably isn’t characteristic of me. But the last four months have probably been the busiest of my work-life up until now. And as you’ll know – if you’ve read any other post on here – I’m a bit of a workaholic.

Suffice to say the busyness isn’t going to be over yet, and it’ll probably be the end of the year before I can settle down, take a look back and review the year gone, and actually process what I’ve learnt and put it into place for next year. I have notes and notes and notes of things I’ve learnt from conferences, discussions with mentors, books I’ve read, and magazines and websites I’ve explored… and I’ve been rushing through at such a fast pace that lots of it hasn’t even been put into practice yet. At least not consciously anyway.

I don’t actually have much to write. No actually, that’s a lie. I could write for ages. But I haven’t been able to sufficiently process everything to know that I want it to be out in cyberspace for ever. I’ve developed a few opinions this year which are probably quite controversial – at least amongst the circles I’ve grown up in. I need to be sure of myself before publicly talking about them.

I did an ego search tonight, and found this blog post. It’s super to know that what I’ve written here has been read and taken in by people. But it still scares me, how much people know about me when I realise they’ve been reading my blog! In that post I’ve linked to, the writer has printed out a copy of my testimony as used to appear on this site. I took it down some time ago now as I wanted to rewrite it to fit in the way I would now express myself – the previous ‘version’ was written several years ago (possibly 2004). It’s nice to know, in a weird sort of way and not through any of my own doing, that what I wrote has still survived online – but it reminds me that I might need to be careful of what I say.

In other news, an ACT election is being held this Saturday. I pre-poll voted so I could volunteer for a party on the day. If you want to know who I voted for, the foundations of my politics haven’t changed all that much since the federal election last year, so look back on my previous posts and you will find out. Given the frequency of my writing this year, they’ll probably be on page two.

I would imagine after four months not many people are regularly checking this site at the moment. But as I always say, I will be back…. soon! One day, in the not too distant future.

The hardest thing about presenting radio for me is finding something to talk about. The first few shows weren’t too difficult, but once I had exhausted my potential topics of conversation and had run out of enthusiastic interviewees, disaster struck. There were some mornings when I had done no preparation whatsoever – due to the fact that once I started back at work in the second week, I was getting about one hour in the evening before I’d have to go to bed. That gave only enough time to hastily listen to an aircheck whilst eating dinner, reading the news, and trying to think about the next morning. Some nights all four of those essential activities didn’t happen and I just went straight to bed… making the next morning’s show rather difficult.

There are some airchecks that I haven’t listened to yet and honestly don’t want to. Most mornings I had people SMS’ing, e-mailing or Facebook’ing me saying what a good job I had done. On those mornings of tiredness and zilch preparation they either weren’t listening, or they agreed that I certainly hadn’t done my best, and didn’t want to discourage me by letting me know that. That’s quite ok – I was well aware!

So preparation is absolutely paramount. Of course I had already been told that, but me being me I have to actually see something like that to believe it. I know now that I don’t want to be sitting there again during a voice break saying ‘um, what did this German MP say about marriage again? Oh yes, she, um wants it to be limited to seven years. I think that’s, um, a very bad idea and is a sad indication of the lack of importance of the institution of marriage in society these days, yeah, um, I think that’s all, ok let’s go to another song’. Stupid. There was alot more I could have said about that if I had prepared for it.

So I’ve learnt that preparation is very important. Ok. But the hard bit is actually thinking of topics to talk about. Not only that, but knowing enough about these topics to make my commentary on them interesting. And, being confident that the listener would actually find it interesting! Breakfast shows with two or three people are certainly easier to present – the amount of interestingness I have to provide is firstly only 50 or 33% of what I would have had to provide before, and as a bonus I can think about what I want to say next whilst the other person is talking!

But I didn’t always have the luxury of doing my shows with more than just me. I mean, who else wants to get up at 5am?

A friend told me that I should think of announcing as being a ‘verbal blog’. That makes a lot of sense. I could actually go and read this post out on air. It probably wouldn’t be the best topic to read out on air, but now that I’ve written it, I’d know exactly what I want to say, and since I have written it and proofread it and basically know it back to front, I’d know how to jump around in the post if I decided I wanted to do that whilst reading it. There we go, that’s preparation taken care of!

Now to topics. Well, I often blog about topics I’m interested in. But, if you look back through my recent blog posts, you’ll see there’s quite alot of time in between them. Maybe you don’t think it’s quite alot of time. But it is for a blogger. And if I’m on the radio every morning and if I’m going to start using my blog posts as my inspiration for my on air conversing, then my blog is certainly lacking quantity. Just to give an idea, I have maybe 18 voice breaks in a two hour breakfast show. Some of them are easily filled – here’s the latest news, the latest weather for Canberra, weather around the country, the time, the current temperature, the current unleaded fuel price or an event from the community calendar that may be of interest to some listeners. But that leaves at least 12 voice breaks. Perhaps it’s a good morning and I have two interviewees. Take six, leave six. I still need at least three topics, assuming there’s enough to talk about to cover two voice breaks each.

Gosh it actually sounds very easy when I break it down like that. Maybe that’s the key. I’m thinking as I’m writing here – that’s something I can’t do on air unless I want to be silent for a few seconds after every sentence!

So if that’s the key, I need to blog more. Hey, that could work well. I could blog often about topics that are of interest to me, and then talk about them on the air. I would have two media to communicate with the listener – and they could comment either by commenting on my blog, or by calling me while I’m on air. This could actually work well!

Thank you, dear reader, for helping me come up with this idea.