I write this on my way home from a night out with the team - so already that's a warning for you. We've done that before and come unstuck, haven't we?

Somehow the subject of melvtopia came up during the evening - some of the team had read it, others hadn't.

It got me thinking about the balance between writing for yourself and writing for an audience. To be honest, I've always been somewhere in between - I blog stuff that I enjoy writing, but also in the hope that others will get something from it too.

I've had varying degrees of success, and it's often been driven by circumstance. While things were all going wrong at zavvi, I found a ready source of blogging topics and an audience that could relate to what I was writing. Bad times but good raw material.

When my good friend Stewart, a proper writer, told me it was time to get over the zavvi stuff and move on, I looked for new inspiration and found it in friends, sport, work and good fortune. There was some good stuff there, though I say so myself. But I assumed that the only people reading were those that had followed me from the early days.

How wrong I was.

Over a number of months the balance shifted too much in the direction of personal - to the point that I was sharing my innermost fears and problems not just with a few old friends but with new followers including some of my colleagues from work - who probably didn't particularly enjoy reading about how difficult I was finding it to settle at Ministry.

Thankfully, being the brilliant colleagues that they are, a quiet word alerted me to the situation and no harm was done. One day I might publish the posts that were rapidly removed from melvtopia...

But it's harder to write without a target. Dan, another friend who really does know how to write, sent me a quote from Samuel Pepys, along the lines of "a happy man does not keep a diary".

On balance though, I think it's better to be happy than miserable, even if the blogging might suffer as a result. If I want anyone to read melvtopia it's up to me to find sources of inspiration.

So to readers old and new, I'll give it my best shot, and if all else fails I can just keep writing about writing...

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