Ok, so I can’t resist it. The end of year review is like catnip to bloggers, even though nobody really gives a rat’s arse about my views about the year. Mind you if I start thinking like that then I’d never manage to get another blog post out again. (Stop crossing your fingers there at the back).

I thought I’d avoid the traditional listing all the good albums and films and telly things and whatnot, because quite frankly I’ve spent most of the year listening to albums that weren’t released this year, most of it German drug bands introduced to me by peoples on the internets and last.fm. As for films, I’ve barely made it to the cinema at all. Telly is, well, telly. I’ve seen an insane amount of telly this year, and there’s been too much of it that I’ve enjoyed to give comment on. Ditto the news. Last night we watched 2011 wipe on BBC Four, and today I listened to the Bugle Podcast review of the year, and both of those were far funnier and more insightful than I could ever be on a year that Charlie Brooker aptly described as like ‘a series finale for all of humanity.’

Now it may be a measure of the fact that I’m beginning to become an actual rounded human being but where in previous years this inability to round up the year in list form would all seem a bit of a failure on my part (no gigs, no cinema, new music not really floating my boat) this year is a bit different. This year things have actually happened.

When you break it down to the main headlines it all sounds a bit daunting; New baby. Promoted twice. Passed my driving test. Not bad going for one year. Add on top of that I’ve done a creative writing course at York Uni, written a hell of a lot of my novel, and started a whole new blog, and I can be pretty chuffed about my personal achievements this year, and the achievements of my rather splendid family. But to call it a bit of a hectic year is as much of an understatement as to say that people on the internet seem to quite like looking at pictures of cats.

Looking ahead to 2012 what I really need is a bit more of a settled year. I’ve already outlined my writing hopes elsewhere, but I’ve got a new job to look forward to and get my head around, a flailing music website in dire need of attention and all the other life stuff that seems to be around. Oh, and the old perennial favourite of losing weight and getting into shape. I went to the gym today for the first time in over a month (a perforated ear drum kept me away for quite a while) and now feel like I’ve been trampled by wild bison. In short, I need to keep trying. Trying to write, trying to make my life a bit better. Oh, and I promise to spend more time here as well, and less of that time doing silly challenges to fill up space. Honest to blog.

Before I do go though, I really should put up some of the music that was rather good this year. If I were going to choose an album of the year then it would undoubtedly be Will Haven’s Voir Dire. But then there is only one video from that album, and it is the weakest track on the album. If there was a runner up, then it would be Origin’s Entity. But that doesn’t have any videos. So let’s go instead with the album I listened to most in 2011, even though it isn’t an album released in 2011. So not the sound of 2011 per se, but the sound of my 2011.

Happy New Year to you all.

The more astute of you will have noticed that this here blog has had a shiny new redesign, and is all sparkling and new. Unless of course your general method of entrance to this blog is through an RSS feed, in which case this blog post will look exactly the same as the last one. But rest assured, the main site is all shiny looking. Mad props to Woo Themes, who have provided the requisite themes for both sites.

The reason for this overhaul, aside from the fact that the last look was never meant to last particularly long, is that I have finally gotten off my rather unshapely behind and set up BloodOnTheMotorway.com. I’m not going to hash over the reasons again here, as I have rather helpfully done that here. Long and short, it will be a place to prattle on about writing. The main benefit for you, dear reader, is that you will no longer have to listen that stuff if you don’t want to. Of which I am sure you are all very pleased.

Anyway, there will be more normal blogging here shortly, including the thrilling conclusions to my Discography thingy (which was rather short lived, but hey let’s not get ahead of ourselves) and the 30 day song challenge that has taken rather a lot longer to complete, as well as the next thrilling instalment of Gym Films.

I can practically hear your excitement from here.

I am determined not to bow out of my blog-a-day target only three days in despite the fact that I am being hampered by several different factors. The first is that I have a tonne of ironing and tidying to do in a short space of time and this is not being helped by the rambunctious child upstairs who seems determined not to settle down. The second is that for every day of this year we call eleven I have been no further out of the house than to walk Ellen to the bus stop and a quick wander around the hideous estate we live with Rosie, until the cold became too much and we retreated to the warmth of our surprisingly cosy house.

So subject matter is thin on the ground. I could tell you, for instance, that today as a reward for helping me take down the decorations I let my daughter dress up as a princess and watch Enchanted, a surprisingly good Disney film. As cute as her enthusiasm for this was at the time, I doubt it is of much interest to you dear readers.

This I think will be the greatest challenge of this ‘blog-a-day’ challenge, if I am to stick to it. The vast majority of days are just plain boring, filled with nothing grand enough to lead to a blog post. I have a few ideas of how to spice things up a bit and keep things interesting, but they will have to wait. There is, after all, ironing to be done.

This problem also presents itself in the other challenge I am setting myself this year, that of the 365 photo project. It’s very hard to find interesting subject matter when you are stuck in one place most of the time, and this isn’t really helped by the fact that I am using the camera on my phone, rather than any fancy piece of photography kit. I’ve seen people doing these projects for the last five or so years and always been a bit envious of them, and noticed how they have all become rather good photographers as a result of their efforts. Seeing as I currently have no photography talent whatsoever, it will be interesting to see if I develop one over the year.

To help me achieve this I have discovered some rather nifty Android apps that turn your smartphone into a vintage camera, and my first attempt is the one at the top of the page I quite like it, even if it is nothing more that the aforementioned bus stop. Still, if nothing else it will give me something to put at the top of these blog posts, I’ve been reliant on Google Images for far too long. Oh, and if you want to follow my progress on 365 you can do so over at my brand new Flickr page.

It’s amazing the kinds of things you cook up to get yourself through the day sometimes. The other day I listened to all the 6 Music Mercury music Nomination podcasts, half an hour for each band, even the ones I didn’t like, just because at the beginning of the day I decided that that was my challenge for the day. Those of you who know me know that me sitting through a half hour of Paul Weller is to most people like climbing Everest. Today, I decided on the bus that my challenge was to listen to 100 songs in a day. Don’t know why, but I do like to set myself a challenge.

This year it feels like all I’ve been doing is setting ‘me’ challenges. Obviously the big one was Year of Health, although that didn’t quite go through to the end, it was still interesting. Then there is Demon Pigeon, and myriad other little tests that I set for myself. I think that as I settle into my third decade I have replaced the listlessness that so defined my twenties has been replaced by a need to make something of myself, despite my previously crippling laziness. I’ve also realised that the best way out of this self-imposed cage of inactivity is to trick my brain like you would a dog, by setting challenges, albeit sometimes impossible ones, to spark that motivation. I’ve always had a problem with people telling me what to do, and it’s as though I need to try reverse psychology on myself in order to kick-start my sense of purpose.

The main point of all the challenges that I set myself for this year was to get writing again. I wrote my first short story when I was 14, after listening to a song by Carter USM. For some reason I sat down and a fully formed story just poured out of me. Before that moment I had no desire to write, or do anything like it, and it was a shock to my young self to find that I had this thing within me. I still think it may have been the best thing I ever wrote. I wish I still had a copy, so I could tell if I was right or not, although in reality if I re-read it now I’d probably be shocked by just how awful it was.

But nonetheless 16 years later and it’s still just about the only thing I want to do, although in truth I’ve done shockingly little to actually achieve this dream. I have always called myself a writer, but the truth is I’ve never actually submitted any of my creative work for review or publication, except to an online magazine that subsequently went broke. It is a matter of confidence I suppose. I know I can write in a journalistic manner, seven years of blog posts and all the other writing I have done over the years for newspapers and magazines will attest that I don’t have the same shyness when it comes to non-fiction.

But neither does it give me the same joy. I love writing the blog, and while I may address it to you, the reader, in truth this is really only for me. I gave up long ago any hopes of garnering a ‘readership’ for this blog that would go along with giving it a shape or purpose. I have watched bloggers that I started off with at Livejournal go on to be hugely successful writers, but I actually like the fact that with my blog I am writing about whatever stumbles through my head. It is as much a journal or a diary or a confessional as it is a public forum. I don’t worry about what I say on here. Sometimes that has gotten me into more trouble than its worth, but I feel very attached to this place now.

But as for other writing, for the likes of Demon Pigeon or whatever, it just doesn’t hold the same amount of joy as writing fiction does. I enjoy it enough, and in the case of Demon Pigeon I get a lot of enjoyment from the administrative side of things, but it’s not the same love that makes me feel like that bewildered 14 year old who just sat down and had words pouring out him, as if from somewhere else, and couldn’t write fast enough to catch them as they spilled out.

So as I said, this year was all about getting me writing again, and in that regard it’s been very successful, as this has easily been my most prolific yet. I’ve written the first fifteen thousand words of a novel, countless articles and blog posts. Not bad, but I’ve been feeling lately that I’m spreading myself a bit thin. When I want to be writing the novel I’ve felt obliged to be doing something else. I’ve felt guilty about blogging when I should have been doing the novel, but then guilty when I haven’t been able to. My writing has (I think) improved quite a bit over the year, but I’ve been focused on too many things to really hammer one area.

Ellen and I sat up for quite some time the other night, going back and forth as we do, talking about what to do with our lives, and the more we talked the more it dawned on me that I don’t really want to be a journalist any more. I want to be a novelist. Far far harder, of course, and I have no idea whether I have even a shot at doing it, but nonetheless that’s what I want to do. And if that’s what I want to do then I am really going about it all the wrong way.

I am not part of any writing groups. I don’t write short stories, and as I mentioned earlier, I have had precisely zero feedback for my creative stuff since I was at school. But now it’s time for me to face my fears and put myself out there. Most authors don’t get published until well into their thirties, so it’s hardly as though I’m coming to this late, but what I need to do is focus on getting better, growing as a writer. I need to get into online competitions and forums, start writing short stories. Maybe take a few short creative courses. There are a few one day courses at York University that look interesting.

Of course the downside of this is that I need to prioritise. Last night I spent a long time talking to the Demon Pigeon guys and let them know that I’m not going to be writing for DP unless I’ve got something I really want to write about. No more feeling that I have to get at least one post up a week. I am still going to be involved, I think, but more as an editorial, organisational type. I can’t turn my back on it completely, I’ve worked too hard on it for one thing, and I’m too proud of what we’ve done so far. But as for writing, that’s going to take a back seat. I have already wound up Year of Health. I’m not going to stop blogging, because that serves a useful function for me. All this stuff has been buzzing round my head for a few days now, but it’s not until I get in down on the page that it feels concrete to me. Of course the downside is that then you have to read it. Sorry.

As for Blood On The Motorway, I am still going to go ahead with that. If nothing else it will provide a useful exercise for me. And I don’t think it’s entirely awful. (Way to big up my work there. Perhaps I need to work on selling myself a bit too.) I don’t know when it will be going up, but there’s no rush. I’d rather get it right than rush it, and I’m really excited about Jonic’s plans for it, so I want the design to be right as well.

As well as this I also have made another decision, and although it’s definitely a positive decision, it’s probably best I don’t speak about it in public, so there may be a password protected post going up again soon. Password will be the same as last time. And if you made it all the way to the bottom of this, then well done you!

Oh, and in case you wondered, I easily got to 100 songs (actually on about 120 now. The first in the sequence was Radiohead’s Exit Music (For a film) and the last was Isobel by Bjork. Thought you might like to know.

What do you mean you didn’t?

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A while back I flirted with the idea of completely junking Windows from my computer and replacing it with Ubuntu, the freeware Linux system, on the sage-like advice of Mr Jonic. I got pretty close to doing it too, even bought a magazine with the boot disk, but then it didn’t work and I got frustrated and the whole idea fell by the wayside. But recently the old computron has become more and more laboured and tired from having to run Vista, and I have to say I can’t blame it, it must be like being a paper-boy with arthritis, having to labour on when the kit you’ve got just doesn’t cut the mustard any more.

Last night was especially bad, and trying to do more than one thing at a time has become night on impossible, and so I downloaded the Ubuntu software and burnt it to disk and thought I would give it a go. And my dear Creamy Jesus is it nice. Firstly, it looks so pretty. It shares a fair bit of both Mac and Windows sensibilities, so basically it looks really nice but doesn’t have the navigation issues that I always seemed to have on Macs (to be fair I haven’t used a Mac in years so this is probably not the case any more) that prevented me from ever buying into the cult of Steve Jobs. Not only that but the responsiveness of the computer improved exponentially, and that was just from using the CD to boot. I gather it will improve even more once I install it to my hard drive. I love it. It is a bit alien still, and I seem to get requests to download software every time I want to do anything, but I imagine that’ll calm down pretty quickly.*

So tonight I’m going to take the plunge and install it, probably only on partition for now in case I change my mind and go back to windows, but I’m quite excited. Before I do I still have a few things I want to test, like playing movies (can’t see any issues there) playing with the word processor, and make sure I can still stick music on my phone without any issues, but if it passes these tests then by the end of the weekend I will hopefully be free from the shackles of Windows.

It does feel strange though, to be saying goodbye to it (not completely, work computers will apparently soon be upgrading from XP to Vista, deep joy) as it’s the only operating system I’ve ever known. I still remember using a computer for the first time in a classroom back in about 1991, and getting told off for moving the mouse before I was told to. Since then my world, like pretty much everyone else, has become more and more reliant on the world of computers, and although I haven’t always been on the Internet, I’ve consistently owned a PC of some kind since about 1995, and seen them grown from glorified calculators with basic word processors, into the super-whizz computrons we have today. And all of them, run on Windows.

And while we’re looking back, I was reminded today by Joe in the comment thread of my last post that come October of this year I will have been blogging for seven years, since my first ever post on Livejournal (again, at the instigation of Mr Jonic, I really should buy him a beer at some point to say thanks) started with some vague grumbling of my then job. Madness. Also, in the same comment thread, it has been pointed out to me that my favoured shortened name for Blood On The Motorway is liable to cause giggles. So from now on I shall try to refrain from using it again. Cheers Jen.

*I actually wrote all of this earlier on, but the install has gone ahead and this is coming to you live from Ubuntu-land. I’ll post more on this later, but by golly-gosh it is marvellous, so much quicker, more responsive.

You may have noticed that things look all shiny and new around here, as promised I have a new theme until the site gets a full overhaul for the launch of BOTM. One downside, however, is that the change seems to have borked my analytics right up, so I can’t see if anyone is actually reading any of this. Any other bloggers will know that there’s little worse than not being able to obsess over your stats, but hopefully this will all resolve itself in the next few days. Today I’ve managed to get a bit more writing done for Blood as well, so I’m now six issues in. For those of you who are interested, I will be aiming for two posts of 1000 (or so) words a week, so this will take care of the first three weeks while I’m getting set up. Ideally though I want more of a cushion, something around the 10 issue mark, so I can make sure I’m not putting anything out without adequate revision. One of the real threats with doing online fiction is that I’ll end up putting up stuff that’s not quite good enough, so I want to try and keep a buffer as much as I can so that things are getting a few revisions before they go up, unlike this blog, which tends to fall out of my head via my hands, and get whacked straight up.

But anyway, I promised you some thoughts on the good and bad of what I’ve been watching of late, so here goes:

1. Doctor Who. I mentioned before how much I thoroughly loved this whole season of the Doctor. I can’t claim to have been the biggest fan in the past, I never really watched it as a kid and while I liked the Ecclestone series and parts of the Tennant stuff (although I never really liked Tennant himself) I now feel as though I have ‘my’ Doctor in matt Smith, and together with Karen Gillan (be still my heart) and Stephen Moffat they have finally created something that stands up as well as anything produced by the Godlike genius of Sci-Fi, Joss Whedon. Smartly scripted, emotionally engaging, brilliantly performed, this was children’s TV that remembered that kids are smart, and they are people. Wonderful stuff, and the double-finale was about the best I’ve seen a series wrapped up, and the episode Vincent and the Doctor (Richard Curtis, where the bloody hell did that come from?) is easily the best thing I’ve seen so far this year. The scene in the Museum had tears streaming down my face, and Ellen’s too.

2. Desperate Housewives. Ellen managed to hook me into this a few years back, and I have been a fan ever since. Again, taking what is essentially whimsical melodrama and marrying it to taut storytelling, good performances and wry humour all combine to make this a show I look forward to more than most, and this season has been excellent, right up until the last episode, which aired on Channel 4 last night. How on earth did they misjudge it so badly. All the various strands and interweaving plotlines were left vaguely resolved, but without any emotional payoff. I mean, there was a serial killer arrested, and a car blew up in the middle of the suburbs with a wanted terrorist inside, but by the very next scene these individual plots were completely ignored. It was lazy storytelling, plain and simple, with the writers too eager to shoehorn clues about next year’s plots to bother resolving this years. Disappointing to say the least, and it makes me wonder if the show’s days are numbered when the writing staff have clearly disengaged.

3. Southland. Ellen and I managed to sit through about twenty minutes of this distincly average Shield clone, before I realised that it was actually nicking the plot from the pilot of the Shield wholesale. Terrible, and the acting was pretty substandard, and the characters should have been walking around wearing their cliches on a billboard rather than cop uniforms. Woeful. Although still not as bad as the Idris Elba vehicle on BBC1, Luther, which was so bad that I’ve tried my utmost to forget it even exists.

4. The IT Crowd. OK so we’re only a couple of episodes in but once again Graham Linehan’s sticom is better than everything. Fact. And I want most of Roy’s T-Shirts, and the pictures he has in his new flat. Hell, I’d even take the bicycle off his hands.

5. Films. Not all of them, obviously, but one of the big pluses to having a V+ box is that I no longer have to miss those cool films that they inevitably stick on at one o clock on a Wednesday morning because I have to go to work the next day. Last night we watched To Kill A Mockingbird, which I was sure I’d seen before but I’m now not sure I had. Needless to say it was brilliant and moving and I now want to use Gregory Peck  as Atticus Finch as a template for how to be a good dad. Oh, and I finally got round to watching both Zombieland and An Education, both of which I highly recommend, although obviously for completely different reasons.

Anyway, that’ll do for now, back to the apocalypse, goodbye.

Firstly, a quick note to say that those of you who have come to the site directly and not just looked at the shiny RSS feed will notice that the site looks awful. Turns out updates are not such a good idea, and I shall be looking at a new theme soon, but in the meantime, please do stay.* Now that’s out of the way, I’d like to talk to you about my office. No, please do stay.

One of the strangest things about our move into the new and shiny new house has been the realisation that getting what you want isn’t always the best of ideas. The main reason for deciding on a three bedroom house (aside from the obvious fact that a three bedroom house is always going to be bigger than a two bedroom) was that finally, I could have an office to do all my writing in. In the old house we had the computer set up in the mockery that was the dining room, but in reality was more of a big space that connected the lounge to the kitchen. As such, it was bloody hard to concentrate sometimes, with Rosie back and forth all the time, and the general cooking time ruled out for actual work. In the new house, however, we now have a spacious office room, with a proper computer desk, a filing cabinet (well, of sorts) and even a nice plush leather sofa bed that enables us to use the room as a guest bedroom. It’s perfect, and should now enable your dear author here to get some serious work done. All except for one thing.

It’s upstairs. Now, what with me not being a Dalek, you wouldn’t imagine that this would be a huge issue for me. But Rosie is a bit young for me to leave her downstairs on her own during the day, so writing when on my own is out. Also, the office is right next to her room, and the hot weather and new room have meant that Rosie rarely settles when we put her to bed as it is, so the notion of sitting and tapping out an opus once she’s gone to bed is also out of the window. And Ellen and I see each other so infrequently that when we do get an evening in together, I rarely want to remove myself from the lounge. So we now have a nice office that never really gets used for any great period of time. Which renders it essentially useless.

All of which is really just excuses. What I need to do is either bite the bullet and admit my mistake and move the computer downstairs, or stop spending my evenings sat in front of the telly, and instead get writing. But as well as the logistical difficulty of using my own computer, I have to admit that the V+ box, which I believe I may have already mentioned once or twice, is making it very hard to get anything done at all. By freeing me of the constraints of having to sit down at a specific time to watch a show, it now allows me to record anything that I think may be of interest to me. Which is a hell of a lot of stuff, it turns out. So now, as unshackled as I am to regular programming, I am having to spend all my time watching telly just to stay on top of it all.

So in other words, I need to stop being a lazy arse. In that spirit, I have once again started working on Blood On The Motorway, which for those of you who don’t know, is the mythical online novel whose existence I have been threatening for a year now. I actually registered this domain a year ago, and the blog was moved to a sub domain, but this whole year it’s been nothing more than a holding page, and I have been putting off its launch for some time. But today I talked to the mighty Jonic about getting the site itself designed and took another pass at the first four episodes/issues so that they will be ready to launch with the site. I’m not going to promise that it will be tomorrow, but it should be soon. I am actually quite excited about it, but I need to get a bit further ahead than I am at the moment before I launch, as if launching Demon Pigeon has taught me anything, it’s that it’s generally a good idea to keep your updates regular. Something we have become a bit shameful at lately, which I shall add to my list of ‘stuff that I need to sort out once I summon the courage to use my computer more.

But enough introspection. Tomorrow I shall return with some thoughts on some of the many TV shows I have been watching, including the terrible end to the otherwise excellent recent series of Desperate Housewives. Yeah, that’s right, I’m in touch with my feminine side, and my feminine side gets pissed off when shows are wrapped up in a ham fisted and illogical way.

*Facelift achieved, shiny new theme installed. I hope that once Blood On The Motorway is done properly that I’ll get the theme for the blog to match it, but this will do in the meantime.

Yep, I made it to one and a half modules, although in real terms that is pretty much a full year and a half.  The reasons are multiple, but in the end it comes down to a lack of resources.  Not enough time, not enough energy, not enough willpower, and crucially, not enough interest.  When I started the course the idea was to train for a career in IT, but strangely enough it seems as though a computing degree is not really what you want to be doing.  At no point in my course would I ever learn how to build a PC, or make one work better.  I can get this information a lot easier and more cheaply than I was from the OU. Also, when I started, the main thrust was to learn web design, but the truth is that I have now launched three websites, albeit with help, but I realised it’s the running and maintaining of websites that interests me, not their design.  There are places like WordPress that take all the pain out of it, and good friends and people I have met on Twitter who can do the rest.

And having launched Demon Pigeon, Year of Health, here, and eventually BOTM, it’s there that I feel I need to focus my energies. I am not posting enough to any of these sites, and a lot of that is down to the fact that I have spent a lot of time thinking that there is a load of Uni work to be done, and if I am going to sit at the computer then it’s that which should get my attention.  And so I avoid the computer altogether, doing neither.

Truth be told I now feel like a weight has been lifted from my back, and that I am now free to blog, in its many guises.  But in order to justify this to myself, I’m going to make a promise. A grand total of 8 posts a week. For Demon Pigeon (where at the very least I have other people to pick up the slack) three here, and three for YOH.  I can only justify this decision if I am honestly going to knuckle down more.  I’ve already spoken to Ellen about setting aside an hour a night.  I want to be better at this, I want my prose to reach the heights of the wonderful bloggers whose work pulls me in every single day.  The only way I can see to do that is to write.  Today I read a great post by Jay over at Do Some Damage about how writers make the time to write, no matter what. I’ve been all too guilty of not doing this. I must do better, and now I don’t have any excuses for not doing so.

So, one of the things I really need to do if redefine this place.  And one of the first things I am going to do is ask you, my loyal readership, for your opinion.  Firstly, what do you think I should do with this place?  I have had a blog far too long to get rid of it now, and yet I find it very hard to find things that would be interesting enough to share with you, my dewar and loyal readers, who are far too discerning and intelligent a breed to fob off with half formed thoughts and gibberish.  See what I did there? I paid you a compliment, now answer my question.

But before you do, I do have a second question, and this one is much more important. I am debating with myself the merits of taking on a further stupid project (not another website, don’t worry) this time in relation to Year of Health.  It’s something that ties in really well with what I am already doing, and will give me added impetus now that the initial stages are complete (I think it’s safe to say I am a non-smoker now.)  But what I have in mind will also require the selection of a charity to do it for.

But which one?  I do have a few favourite causes that I could do it for, NSPCC, Oxfam, Amnesty etc.  But to be honest the money I raise will probably be not very high, and certainly for these sorts of organisations nothing to write home about.  If I am going to do this (and I must stress I haven’t decided to do it yet) I would like it to be for a smaller organisation that would really benefit from the tawdry and pitiful amount that I will be raising.  I was really inspired by what Gray did with Twitterthon, doing it all for a small organisation that most of the people who donated had never had any cause to donate to.  The problem is that I have no real personal ties to any such organisation.

So here’s what I would like.  If you could recommend a charity to me, along with the reason that you think it’s worthy of support, and whoever does the best job of convincing me will be the winner.  Not particularly democratic, maybe, but that’s how I roll baby.  Ideally I am looking for something small, and maybe a bit out there.  But I leave it in your capable hands.