Procrastination Station
It turns out that one huge benefit of making your post a private one is that you get to see exactly who is reading it, because they have to contact you direct and ask you for a password. Which is nice. Thankfully quite a few of you did, and provided me with just the ego-massage that I required. What you didn’t do, by and large, was leave me any helpful comments. If you don’t know what I am talking about then by all mean feel free to email me, hit me up on Twitter or Facebook and I’ll send you the password. But despite the warming glow of people asking to read something of yours I shall resist the temptation to ask you to do so again, I suspect I’d get far less of a take up than before.
I’ve been feeling a bit more productive again of late, and having pretty much rounded up part one of Blood On The Motorway it’s time to turn back to my normal blogging. Before we go any further let me do a little bit of whoring and point you in the direction of a piece I wrote for Demon Pigeon about Axl Rose and a bit of a moratorium over at the Year of Health. As well as this I’ve taken my first steps into the wider world of trying to get paid for writing things. I’ve signed up to a company called Suite101, which is a site that gets you to write short articles for them and then they pay you a slice of the Google Advertising revenue that you get from the article. On the face of it this is not going to be a particularly lucrative deal, but from what I can tell (and the proof will come if this actually happens for me) but most articles wont pull in more than, say, $1 a month, unless they get really noticed. But that’s not actually that bad when you consider that will be for 12 months. If I can crank out three or four of these articles a week, then it wont be long before I build up enough of a head of steam that the money coming in will be quite nice. It’s never going to be enough to allow me to survive on it (unless I get really lucky on it and have a whopping hit of an article) but it’ll be a nice bit of extra cash.
That is, of course, if it works as advertised. I’m still pretty sceptical about the whole thing, but the way I see it is that if it doesn’t work then I’ve not really lost anything save for a little bit of time. As well as that, it’ll give me an excuse to write some copy that I can then use in a portfolio, and broaden the type of writing I can show around. As much as I love Demon Pigeon, it’s hardly the kind of content that is likely to lead to a job. I really do want to start building up a decent portfolio, and as much as I’ve kept writing in public ever since I left the Asian Express, very little of it is usable for a portfolio, and most of the stuff I can use is about 5 years old, and a lot of that is not really very good. So even if this doesn’t bring in the cash, I can write about whatever I want, so I can use it as an exercise in bulking out my portfolio. But I do hope it does bring in the cash.
But that’s enough shop talk. I know this blog has become a bit of a procrastination station recently, but I really do want to take the whole ‘writing’ thing seriously, and as a result it’s pretty much all I have to talk about. Boooooring.
So what else have I been doing? Not a lot. Yesterday I appear to have agree to another web project, although this one is not particularly labour intensive, should be fun too, and will probably become more popular than anything else. We shall see.
Other than that I have been largely watching the repeats of Mad Men on BBC2 on a Sunday night. It’s divine, even though nothing ever actually happens in it. One of the episodes this week had a plot that actually revolved around some people going for a drink after work, and nothing happened when they did. I am utterly transfixed. I think it’s the world’s most expensive and brilliant screensaver. The real hook in it is the characters, which are brilliantly drawn and very well acted, but have the added bonus that the writers make no effort to ascribe them a goal or obvious motivation. They’re just people, complex and trying to get through the day. Marvellous stuff and I am very happy knowing I still have three and a half series of it at the very least makes me happy. Oh, and talking about the show this much gives me justification to put pic of the lovely Christina Hendricks at the top of this post. Yum.
Other than that I’ve been watching a lot of the Hurricane Katrina docs that have been on to mark the five year anniversary. I’ve only watch the first half of the epic Spike Lee doc ‘When The Levees Broke’ but it’s magnificent, moving, and bewildering. Can’t quite see how it’s going to stretch to four hours though. Oh, and we’ve been watching the original Swedish Wallander, which is excellent but bloody hard work, so much so that watching one episode puts you off watching the next one a bit, even though it’s really enjoyable.
So yeah, it turns out that all I’ve been doing is watching telly. No change there then.
Protected: On Pastures
Rests, Returns & Waitresses
Soooo, nearly three weeks without an update, but the good news is that rather than being a layabout, I've been (largely) hard at work on the novel, and I'm getting pretty pleased with the state of things so far. At the moment I have the first 5 issues sewn up, a further four needing a second draft, and the bones of a story arc in place for a second narrative thread. I had a good meeting with the Jonic about developing the site itself, and while I don't think I'm anywhere near ready to launch, the progress is ongoing in a way that it hasn't been for months. A lot of this is down to having the support of a girlfriend who doesn't mind me buggering off to work upstairs of an evening and even kicks my arse a little to make sure I do. That this coincides with her wanting to watch Big Brother is, I am sure, a coincidence.
As well as working hard, Ellen and I both took all of last week off to spend time with our lovely little lady. Over the course of the summer a general lack of funds coupled with a plethora of events such as moving house have conspired to prevent us from doing a lot that is Rosie-centric this summer, so we decided to redress the balance. Rather than spend a week away somewhere (which we will be doing later in the year with a trip to Devon) we decided to take advantage of the many local summery things that are convenient and cheap and have the added advantage of being close enough to mean we could spend the nights in our own beds. And so over a packed week we went to Leeds to Tropical World and a lovely walk through Roundhay Park, to Scarborough for a lovely day at the beach, to Waterworld in York, and one lovely afternoon for Ellen and I in a beer garden whilst Rosie had a day at Nursery. To cap it all we then tested how excellent our daughter is by taking her to her first festival, Moor Music. I reviewed the festival itself for Demon Pigeon here, but it's worth noting that Rosie had a fantastic time and seemed to enjoy sleeping in a tent more than she does in her own bed. So it turns out our daughter is very excellent indeed. But then we already knew that.
Of course the downside to taking a week off work is that you have to return to work itself. But you can't have everything. I may have a password protected post going up over the next day or so, when that happens feel free to email me or hit me up on Twitter if you are so inclined and I'll provide said password.
Last night Ellen and I watched one of the myriad films that is currently clugging up our V+ box (we're verging on having enough to start our very own To Watch Pile) a thoroughly charming little film called Waitress, which I confess I had recorded simply for the presence of a Mr Nathan Fillion, but which surprised me by being in turns warm and dark and funny and sweet. On top of that, I'd say it was the first Rom Com I've seen in as long as I can remember where I honestly didn't see the end coming. Highly recommendable.
Sadface/Happyface
I've a couple of mega busy weeks at work that have left me too knackered to do much, so I haven't done much in accordance with my knackeration. But now, I feel compelled to write and tell you all that I am in mourning, albeit a temporary state of bereavement. Yesterday I had to go and see my friend Laurie at T-Mobile and hand him my shiny lovely HTC phone. In return all he gave me was a dull and lifeless battered brick of a Motorola, which has clearly been a courtesy phone to so many people that I'll be utterly shocked if I don't contract the Hanta virus just by holding it up to my ear.
It's been less than a day and already I fell like I've lost a limb. I know that to the vast majority (i.e. all) of you this will sound very silly, but I've become very dependant on my phone, although I rarely use it as such. It is my RSS reader, my portal to Twitter and Facebook, my music player and my podcast reader. It is a portable search engine, my bus timetable, my reader count, my calorie counter, my exercise tracker and more besides. Even though I sit and write this at a computer which has the internet, without my phone I still feel a little bit adrift, cut off from the wider world. This is due to continue for another two weeks. Hence, sadface.
But let us not dwell too much on such hardships, let's face it in the grand scheme of things this barely even registers as a problem, so I shall move on, albeit whilst simultaneously glaring at my replacement phone like it might bite me at any moment. Last time I spoke to you I was about to install Ubuntu and it was a staggering success. It's a lovely operating system, although it has taken me a few weeks to recover all my old files from the old Windows set up. The best thing about it is that it now has Chrome browser which is staggeringly fast, the applications do everything that's been asked of them so far (which is not a lot, admittedly) and the move from Word to Open Office has been very easy. But the best thing of all is the speed. Switching on my PC with Vista was the sort of thing you used to have to do in stages. Turn it on, go and make a cup of tea, come back, log on, go and do something else for five minutes, come back, hit the browser, go and make a Sunday roast and hey presto the computer is ready. All told the whole process could take up to 15 minutes. I timed it with Ubuntu the other day and from hitting the power button to having a web page open and fully loaded took 32 seconds. And my computer is so much happier, no longer roaring at me liked a wounded bull staggering on its death march, but more like a happy cat, purring lightly. I love it. If you are having problems with Windows (ie if you have Windows) I heartily recommend making the change. It's really easy too.
Other than that the big thing that has happened is the wedding of my two good friends Laurie and Clara. It was an absolute belter of a day, and Rosie managed to make it (almost) to the end without any problems, although we paid for it for the next few days with her sleep routine being shattered. And it seems as though weddings are the 'in' thing this year, as my oldest internet friend (and phenomenally talented writer) Lis got married to the also excellent (and prodigiously talented writer) Jay, which I was very moved to get an invite to but very disappointed not to be able to attend. Also, my old friend Emma and her fella Laurence managed to elope in some style and get a Vegas Wedding, replete with Elvis impersonator. Very pleased for all concerned.
Other than that I don't want you to think that I've been completely lazy, as I have been working on BOTM (stop sniggering at the back) as I got about 9000 words in and then decided that I need to have a rethink, and have decided to move away from a single 1st person narrative to a more traditional 3rd person narrative. Obviously this is daunting and somewhat irritating to do this far in, but which is definitely the right move, not least of all because it allows me to move to multiple story arcs. I was starting to worry about what I have but this has really resparked the fire. In truth I was basically working with stuff I wrote over a year ago, and it felt a little stale, and I was struggling with the story. Traditionally I am more of a suck-it-and-see writer, which is all well and good for a first draft but when you are serialising online you have to realise that your first draft is going to be a final draft. I really need to plan the whole thing out, or at least come up with a general plotline.
This is definitely new territory for me. One of the things I most enjoy about writing fiction is that part when you are writing and what you write surprises you. It's great fun and that is to me when you know that your characters are taking on a life of their own, when they start to make decisions that you wouldn't take. But I'm also aware that this method of writing is very hit and miss and considering this is going to be pretty much the first time my writing has ever really been read, I don't want to find myself building up a readership only to box myself into a corner plotwise, which is always a real risk. I'm never going to be the kind of writer to plan things out in meticulous detail plot wise, I still want to go on the journey with my characters, but more structure is definitely going to be the way to go with this. I'm not sure how I am going to implement it, and I still need to sort out a time to sit with Jonic and talk about the design but things are most definitely progressing. Incidentally if there are any writers out there who know of any good support software for detailing all your thought processes, plots, characters etc, I'd love to know. At the moment everything is spread about in various Open Office documents, and it would be nice to play around with a new toy.
Anyway, it's nice to be back, and here's hoping the good people at the HTC factory send me my phone back ASAP.
Ubuntastic
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.
On Doctors, Housewives, Bad Cops, Atticus Finch and Damn Statistics
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.
When is an office not an office?
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.
Service please
As I mentioned before, I am really suffering with writers block at the moment. I have managed to write one thing though, a bit of a missive to Virgin Media for the terminally awful piece of shit they call 'service.' I thought I might post it here, just on the off-chance that I can later try and persude them that you dear readers are numbered in the tens of thousands, and that I am what they call in marketing terms 'an arbiter of taste.' This also means I don't have to try and go through it all again, as typing anything seems to fill me with a certain amount of unspecified dread, roughly akin to when you have a hangover and have that guilty feeling that you just can't shake all day. But anyway, what follows is my letter to Virgin. It's not one of the comedy letters you see so often and that can be rather wonderful, mainly because they are easily dismissable, and I want a resolution.
"I am writing to complain about being mis-sold a package on Virgin by one of your sales staff. I initially was looking at a range of options for my new home, amongst which was Virgin. Having entered a few details onto your website I got a follow up call from one of your agents, and discussed the matter further. I had looked at getting the bundle which included Broadband L (which included the wireless router), TV M+, and phone M, as well as the V+ box with associated costs. I ran through the details with him over the phone, and he said that if I could call him back he would be able to get a better deal for me. I looked into it further and decided to call him back.
At this stage he offered me various discounts, including dropping the one off charge for the V+ box. We discussed this in specifics as I explained to him that I was not all that bothered about the HD aspect, as I don't have a HD TV, but I really wanted the V+ aspect. He informed me that the HD box was the V+ box, and so I agreed.
We moved into the house and managed to get everything set up, although was a bit annoyed to find that my router had been downgraded to a non-wireless kind, this was never mentioned. But when I came to try the V+ box I was very upset to find that it actually was just an HD box, without the V+. I immediately phoned your customer services centre and spoke to someone called *******, who was extremely rude, told me there was nothing he could do and that he also couldn't get me a manager to speak to, but that he would get one to call me back within an hour.
That call never came, so I phoned back, and this time spoke to someone whose name I didn't catch, but they told me that there was no problem, and that you could send me out the V+ box, but not until my account had finished setting up on the system, and that I should phone back the next day.
I called back the next day, and was told that it still wasn't set up, but that I would get a call the next day to confirm sending out my V+box.
Two days later I still had not received a call back, so again I called your centre, only to be told I could not get the V+ box that was promised to me, as I had not paid for it. Eventually I was told that I could purchase one for £100, or by upgrading to the XL TV package.
In summary, I am very disappointed by this service. The box that I do have is completely useless to me (it also has a nice habit of crashing just as I am in the middle of watching something, if only I had V+!) and the V+ box was one of the main reasons I took your service, and was explicitly promised to me as being within the package I was signing up for. I would like you to look back over my account and listen to the various calls to me and from me on ******** , and once you have confirmed this, I would like to be sent both the V+ box, and a wireless router.
If this is not resolved, I will be cancelling my contract immediately and going to one of your competitors.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Paul"
Interestingly, I was promised over the phone that if I sent a letter of complaint I would get a definite response within 48 hours. It turns out that what I would get is an immediate automated response which say's, and I quote:
"Hi Paul,
Thanks for the email you sent to us on *********. We're on the case and a member of our team will get back to you as quickly as possible, usually within 5 days. Don't forget - if there's anything else you'd like to know, just log on to our website. It's at www.virginmedia.com"
How utterly helpful. What's the betting that I don't get a response within 5 days?*
So there you go. The world's most blatant attempt to circumvent writers block. Hopefully it will have worked, and I can write something somebody may actually want to read.
*I actually wrote this two days ago now, so by reckoning, Virgin will get back in contact with in exactly 'when hell freezes over' days time.
There is no other word than Fail.
Ok, I admit it. I bit off more than I could chew. I had too much on my plate. I must now eat humble pie. Choke on my words. Hang on, enough with the food metaphors. I must be hungry. I'm always hungry, but that's the price you pay for being on a diet. But I digress. Today I have had to call time on one of the many many things that I have taken on. I decided to drop out of my Open University course.
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.
Demon Pigeon
After some deliberation the decision has been made that now is the time to unleash onto the world our new project, so get down on your knees, and make Demon Pigeon your new God.
That is not to say that we've gone live with it just yet, but more that we're getting quite bored of not telling anyone about it. Besides, it might be a good idea to build expectations, so that we can roundly let those same expectations down when we launch in January.
To wit, expect nothing short of the greatest website that your eyes have ever witnessed, and prepare those same eyes to weep with unbridled joy at the marvellous spectacle. Oceans will shift, cities will be levelled. Women and children will tremble in fear. Governments will fall. It's all gonna be a bit epic, to be honest.
So what is Demon Pigeon, you may well ask yourselves. Well at the moment it's a holding page, but come January the somethingth (we're not altogether decided on that) it will be a metal site, chocked full of news, reviews, interviews and more. Unlike other sites out there, we will also be covering areas that are of general interest to metalheads, from books to comics to film to art.
But who these magnificent bastards who will be helping me with this endeavour? You may well ask. My Co-Editor and all round fancy gent is Daniel Cairns, and he will also be running the new @demon_pigeon Twitter feed. If you are on Twitter, go follow us now, since Dan is a lot funnier than I am.
As well as this we also have Games Junkie extraordinaire Andi Hamilton. And no, it's not the little writer of Drop The Dead Donkey, and yes, I'm as disappointed as you are. Also joining us is Noel Oxford, writer extraordinaire, and fellow escapee with Dan from another metal site. Rounding out the team is Dom Sohor, who will be making the whole place look awesome with his lovely shiny visuals, and occasionally words too. Go check out his gallery, it's full of awesome.
So that's the big news that I couldn't tell you, so consider yourselves duly told. If any of you are massively disappointed by this, you know what to do.
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