First things first, happy new year and welcome to 2012! I hope everyone had a pleasant Christmas.

This is a bit of belated post, really should have done this in December but I haven’t written anything since November after NaNoWriMo ended. If you don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, well it’s a month you’re meant to set aside and attempt to write 50,000 words of a novel. The idea is to flat out write non-stop, get the writing juices going.

I sadly finished at only 30063 words, which averages out at about 1000 words a day and just over half the target. Once NaNoWriMo finished, I took short break… and didn’t write until a month later. I was drained, my motivation to write anything had been sapped. It’s not as bad as it sounds, December is full of stress too, new work project, present buying, organising travel and arrangements for the holidays, school shows to attend and so on. So lots of things to drain any extra energy I had. But now the busy-ness of the holidays is over and I can start to get back into the swing of things.

Still I can’t deny that NaNoWriMo drained me a lot. Before that I was doing a solid 1000 words a day with my wordcount. I wasn’t getting 7000 words a week out though because I took a few nights off to do various other things. It was a much more healthy approach. So when I was writing, I was enjoying the process and the wordcount target kept me going. However with NaNoWriMo that got turned up to 11. I had to hit a target of 2000 words a day at least to hit the 50,000 words, and I had to write every day. If I missed a day, I had to catch up the next day. If the story wasn’t working, I couldn’t give up the wordcount for a day to go back over it and see what I needed to do. I had to keep going.

I haven’t looked at what I wrote. It wasn’t until the 20,000 mark when I realised the story wasn’t going to work. But I kept going, pushing forward. I had a lot of good ideas but I mowed through them to try and hit that target. The lack of flexibility created stress and I discovered I really do only have a finite amount of creative “bandwidth” for these things. Pushing over the limit didn’t work for me. Everyone has their own limits. I do a lot with the kids in the evening for example and so my writing is done after the kids are in bed.

It’s not all bad, it was great to attempt to write a novel. Taught me a lot about long-form writing. I’ve written so much flash fiction and short stories over the years that I hadn’t realised that novel writing is a different sort of craft. So there is no regrets. Even during December where I wrote nothing, I did instead reach for my pen and my new Wacom tablet and do some drawings and images. (I even setup a DeviantArt profile if you are that way inclined). It also gave me some space, a break from my existing projects. And now I’m rearing to go, getting back into the swing of things.

Here’s to 2012!

Related Posts:

• Where is that writing niggling feeling gone?
• Wordcount
• Timelessness
• For fun or for success?
• Going on holidays tomorrow!

Now I know what it’s like to not be a writer (even a perpetual amateur like me).

It’s quite liberating. No agonising over not writing, no overthinking on words and scenes and meanings. Freedom to choose what I spend my time doing. Is this what it’s like all the time for people who don’t write?

I got two new shinies in the last three weeks, a Nintendo 3DS and a shiny new Android phone. I knew I’d loose a few days of #wordcount to the new toys. Heck it was my birthday, right?

But that niggling feeling that you should be writing… it’s gone right now. The “niggling feeling” can be the worst source of procrastination with writing (sometimes called Writers-block). You know you should write, but you don’t have the energy/will/whatever to start something right then¹. Which only feeds that niggling feeling, which in turn increases the tension between starting something and your energy and can be a vicious circle. I thought I broke it with my wordcount² which I was successfully hitting nearly everyday.

It’s even snaked it’s way into my social media habits, making me more of a consumer than contributor. I’m just more than a little disinclined to engage or post on the various (okay two) services I frequent and even less likely to comment. I even let one or two days go by without checking it and don’t make any attempt to catch up.

I find this mildly curious, why my desire to write is tided into my desire to share online?

And my ennui does not appear to be abating. In fact I see it getting worse. I just got Street Fighter 4 for my new 3DS and a mixture of solid casual gameplay and a strong dose of nostalgia, has absorbed me. But Gaelcon ascends on the horizon (despite the flooding) this weekend and after that is the potential of NanoWriMo next month (which I seem to have avoided making any decision on). So maybe it’ll pan out.

Maybe I should consider this a holiday away from writing.

¹ It’s not just in writing, in my secret identity as a programmer, we jokingly call this tension in our work flow “context-switching”, after the computer operation (done by the CPU) of switching between tasks and loading in and out the associated context of states and threads and so on. When you’re working an embedded device, you want to reduce these sort of operations as it can be an expensive task in terms of load. It seems it can also be an “expensive task” for us humans too and if you’re already tired, it can suck all motivation out of your next task.

² This blog post only counts for ~500 or so words of my #wordcount for the day. But it’s something. It’s all words.

Related Posts:

• I failed at NaNoWriMo 2011, but it isn’t all bad

One of the positive things for me that has come out using Google+, was when I was complaining about my inability to make time to write, between early starts, a full time job and two kids, my wife and myself are pretty exhausted by the time they’re in bed.

It was suggested by some¹ to stick or target a word count per day, post about it regularly and so build up the habit of writing. Once that suggestions was out in the open I had no choice but to try it.

A few other things have been percolating in my mind as well. I’m sure many of you have already seen the “sitting is killing you” infographic where it extols the terrible dangers of sitting. Made me think of how sitting in my favourite chair (which I loving now think of as my seat of DOOM!) in the evening, my body just turns off, leaving me, at best, to watch TV, or at worst, troll the internet from my laptop. I can’t write when I hit that seat in the evening, I’ve tried.

So, for my first experiment, I took the laptop to the kitchen table, turned off the wireless (the internet is nearly a bigger danger than my seat-of-doom) and started writing, resulting in about 1000 words and taking a reasonable amount of time, about an hour and half. So that became my target. Afterwards I retreated to my seat-of-doom and let my brain switch off for a while before bed.

And so far it seems to work. Sure there has been up and down days where I’ve written less than 800 words and other days where I haven’t written anything (I think falling asleep at the laptop is a good excuse). I haven’t slavishly stuck to the word count metric though, because sometimes starting a new section means pulling in notes and organising them and planning how to attack the section, so few words are actually written but the same amount of brain-space used. In that case the amount of time becomes important. I do post on Google+ about my word count but not every day, noting why I failed if I did.²

I think I’ve hit a good rhythm with the word count. It’s about long enough to get something done but not that long that I start to steer too much into brain-shutting-down-for-the-day. So I don’t have much re-writing when I read back over the words. I’ve also focused steadily on one project, which has made it easier to just sit down and start writing. This blog post is an attempt to use up some of that word count to do something else, such as blogging. And more importantly, I’m starting to get an “itch” when I get home, grabbing the laptop and bringing it in the kitchen so I can write while the kids play.³

But there is a downside. First, I’m not playing any computer games at all. I was really getting into Oblivion: Elder Scrolls, but now I’ve stopped. I have an not-yet-played copy of Portal installed. I haven’t made the time to play. I’m sure that doesn’t sound like a great evil, but still playing games exercises other parts of my brain than TV and books.

I read less. Much less. This is a greater evil! I have two books out from the library that need renewing, not a normal situation for me. I’m also spending over an hour, in the kitchen, by myself, leaving my wife in the living room by herself and sometimes left waiting because there is some show we like to watch together.

But so far, having a word-count target seems to have worked for me for getting over procrastination and other excuses. In fact, this post counts to 832 words of my word count for today. Yea!

And finally and probably the most important thing in this post, do you think footnotes work in a blog post? Are they distracting? (I have a tendency to want to read the footnote within the text of other people’s posts myself).

¹ Not sure what the right protocol these days for naming names or linking to profiles. The discussion was on a “Limited” post on Google+. One of the strength of Google+, at least early on, was connecting with people of the same interests, writers (both with stuff published and not) in Ireland.

² It seems folks on Google+ either don’t mind such posts or like to see them because they think it’s neat or even inspiring to see someone start a new habit. So there you go, another +1 for G+.

³ Doesn’t often work that well, spending 15 minutes writing one sentence because my wonderful son wanted to draw beside me and kept wanting me to look at what he was drawing is frustrating because of the context switching my mind was doing. Sometimes it’s better to shut the laptop and draw with my son instead.

Related Posts:

• I failed at NaNoWriMo 2011, but it isn’t all bad
• For fun or for success?
• Crossposted: How nasty do you want your Demons?
• Energy levels down, normal service will resume later
• Dead Desktop PC = More Drawings

Blame Google+. I do.

Putting that side I shall be trying to do some posts over the next few weeks. I’ve set myself a “word count” for each day and I’ve been hitting it more often than not (I post about it on G+ for those interested). But I’ve focused on one big writing and haven’t made the effort to do other writings, so I’m planning to spend a portion of that word count on writing some blog posts. Do not expect a deluge but one a post a week would be better than no posts ever.

That is all. Resume your normal activities.

Related Posts:

• I failed at NaNoWriMo 2011, but it isn’t all bad
• Wordcount
• Timelessness
• For fun or for success?
• I’d go mad for an iPad with but one change!

(I wrote this shortly after coming back from my holidays in July. Not sure why I didn’t decide to post it, probably post-holiday blues).

Back from holidays and I’m only a few days in work and it feels like an age.

So Sunday night (which is actually a few weeks back now), last day before going back to work, the bedtime routine with my daughter went like this:

My daughter was in bed, reading her book and I came up to say lights out, have to get up in the morning, first day back. She refused to, nearly finished the chapter Daddy. Okay, I gave her a few more minutes.

Come back up later, she’s still not finished (part of me begins to thinks she’s gone onto the next chapter, but I know that’s not fair), she still needs to get up early tomorrow, so I insist. She get’s upset quickly, a sure sign she’s tired. But all calmed and lights out.

She wants a song. It’s already a hour after both kids originally went to bed. Soon it’ll be my bedtime, because I have to get up before her. But I consent. Big hug and kiss.

Now I can relax, too tired now to do anything productive. But no, my daughter wants her bed setup the way she likes. Seriously? I look at the time. Remind her again, it’s late. But I agree, gritting my teeth and set her up.

Such a contrast to the routine on holidays and already a build up of stress.

We go for three weeks every year. Enough to cover travel and still have a solid two weeks of, well, doing next-to-nothing in the French country side. I still brought my laptop with me, but there was no internet connection.

About a week into the holiday, my phone died. Just stopped working. It was only then we realised that my phone had been our common clock. We were using it to decided to start making lunch or dinner, or when to get up with the kids. I was using it to watch the time and everyone else was referring to me for the time. But without it, and no watch, we were and everyone else was suddenly timeless. (Not truly timeless, of course. There were clocks, but you had to go find them, strangely no-one wears a wrist-watch any more).

Not that it was a big shock. Early on in the holidays, us adults were already sleeping in on the mornings. The kids are old enough to be able get up themselves. And I (or someone else) would get up, roughly around 10am, and get them dressed, feed and chuck them outside (if it wasn’t raining). 10am was just a natural point though. Normally it was the call of either my bladder or my stomach that got me out of bed at 10am, not an alarm clock. And so we were already working near-timeless before my phone died.

But now we had lunch when we all started to feel hungry or started planning dinner when it was evening and the kids were hungry. We’d still aim to put the kids to bed at the same time, but if they weren’t tired or they wanted to do something, we’d let them stay up a bit and when finished they went to bed and fell asleep quickly. No struggles or hassles.

And we the adults, we play games and go to bed when we started to feel tired.

And this enabled me to write. There is no writer’s block when there is no worry about time. You write till you don’t want to write or something demands your attention like the kids or hunger. You know you have more time later. I thought I’d just become lazy and just do nothing when I have too much time, that I need structure. Apparently not. I drew when I felt like it too. (I didn’t attempt to do any projects with my drawing, but that was a conscious decision I made before the holidays.)

I spent good time with the kids, with my wife and got fully rested. I actually spent time day-dreaming on purpose, something I would feel guilty about when not on holidays.

But once we had to hook back into timetables and deadlines, stress suddenly returns. And time becomes precious. Getting the kids to bed becomes pressured, because there are deadlines. Specific times they have to get up. Things that need to get sorted.

Time or the perception of the passing of time seems to be for me the source of most daily pressures and it sometimes feels a bit arbitrary. Kids school opens at 8am. Why? Why 8am and not 10am? (I read that teenagers, for example, work better if they sleep in late). Why do we work 9 to 5, Monday to Friday? It’s purely convention, an agreed use of time. The idea of maximising productivity is the act of making as much use as possible out of the time you have.

Even writer’s block to me feels partly due to time… I have to write now, this is my window, but what I write is crap. I’m running out of time… I become paralysed unable to act, as if some imaginary clock is ticking down turning my procrastination into worry.

Real world example: “From daunting to doubting”. Here is a post I wrote about my big writing project, where I’m losing enthusiasm and energy for it. It was the pressure of time, the “result” taking too long for me to see.

Now contrast with this post I made after the holidays: “I’m back from outer space…”. I got loads done and I’m excited again.

Removing the constraints of limited time, at least for me, is a big aid to creativity.

Related Posts:

• I failed at NaNoWriMo 2011, but it isn’t all bad
• I’d go mad for an iPad with but one change!
• Going on holidays tomorrow!
• Wordcount
• It’s quiet in here!

I’ve been thinking about this in the back of mind for a few days, but I find myself looking at my projects in two ways. Pet Projects or Products.

I hear a lot about how to make creative works successful, you know mantras like “fail early, fail often”, etc. On one hand I have a ton of unfinished short stories, ideas and notes filling up my notebook and unfinished scraps of software on my laptop’s harddisk. Yet I still preserve with my Lost Heroes RPG, a project perhaps I should have quit on an age ago when it has become apparent it’s not going to be some sort of whirlwind success or if a minor success (for the record, I’m not going to quit on it and I’m currently working on a rules system for it).

Makes me think, there are two types of projects, defined more by your attitude towards them than anything else. A product is something you’re trying to “sell” (in some abstract sense) and if it doesn’t sell or find an audience, it’s a failure. But a pet project is something you do because you want to do it. It’d be great if you find an audience, but if you don’t, so what?

For me products are the stuff I do in work. I get paid to do them and they are done at a professional level. You have to be ruthless about it, avoid adding new features, doing everything as right as you can straight up.

Pet projects are stuff I do for fun, in my spare time. I make mistakes, I learn. I explore options and tangents and cut away stuff at my own impulse. Lost Heroes RPG is my on-going pet project. I’ve learned about writing, mythology, game design, etc. and it’s brought me in contact with other gamers and writers. Even if, no-one else reads it, I’m still enjoying working on it.

It’s a little bit about sanity too, if I’m working on something because I’m enjoying the work, then “failure” is only what I chose it to be. If it’s a product, I can prepare myself for failure by simply distancing myself. I’m not talking about what failure is, only how I treat and react to my spare time projects.

TDO-Mini-Forms was also a pet project, one that perhaps should have been a product in hindsight. I was working on it because I was enjoying it. I was learning about PHP, coding for the web, working with WordPress and so on. But people were and are using it, expecting a supported product. That’s a bit of a disconnect, working on something as a pet project but random people consuming it as a product. I would have been happy with a small number of users and supporting them, while extending it and learning how to do things right.

But the number of users is quite high. Still not getting used to google occasionally telling me about some random dude on Twitter who stating that it’s utter crap because of X, Y or Z. It stomps all over why I was enjoying working on it. Turning a pet project, not into a product, but into a chore was/is a death knell working for the appreciation of faceless strangers. Will I start up work on TDO Mini Forms? Maybe, but I’ll need an attitude adjustment towards it first. I’d be tempted to start over, doing something from scratch, taking what I learned from TDO-Mini-Forms. I’d also need a machine that gives me reams of extra spare time to work on it as well.

I think if I were to start trying to write a novel (I have a few ideas) for example, I would be treating it as a Product, taking on board everything I’ve learned from writing Lost Heroes RPG and the various little flash fictions or short stories I’ve hacked together and being a bit more ruthless about it. The same would go for any software project I might start that’s bigger than a very simple tool.

Related Posts:

• Forgive me Internet, for I have been lax. It has been over six months since I did any work on TDO Mini Forms…
• Going on holidays tomorrow!
• Energy levels down, normal service will resume later
• I failed at NaNoWriMo 2011, but it isn’t all bad
• Where has TDO Mini Forms plugin gone?

Yep. There is one change that would make me buy an iPad.

No it’s not implementing Flash. While I can live without Flash, I dislike the motive behind Apple not supporting Flash. And Flash games too, some of them are fun. But no, it’s not the lack of Flash.

It’s not that Apple are becoming the next “Evil Empire” with their vendor lock-ins, walled-gardens markets, their worrying editorial powers (no porn on the ipad/iphone? Shouldn’t that be my choice?) or forcing app developers to do things their way. I could accept all those limitations with just this one change.

It’s not the lack of camera. Sure the camera would be nice, imagine video conferencing with that sort of device? That would indeed be “awesome”, to use a popular American adjective. You could even take snaps of documents rather than carry those documents around. But the camera, I could do with out. Sure wasn’t I using mobile phones before they had cameras?

It’s not the lack of an SD slot or USB ports either. Seeing now I trade stuff between my devices like the Wii, my old Palm, my DSi, my mobile phone, my digital photo frame and even different PCs using USB drives and SD (and micro SD), I could get by, particularly because I’d probably be forced to use iTunes to transfer my videos and photos and it’d have to convert everything from mp3 and divx to Apple based right?

I hate virtual keyboards. That tech is old, my Palm supports a virtual keyboard and I never used it. I’m forced to use it on the DSi and it drives me nuts. Pen based input is only slightly better but not great. I can text like bloodly bejesus on my phone, but I wouldn’t write a blog post or compose a long email that way. It’s a pity it doesn’t have pen based input. That would be a huge plus but it’d have to be decent though, it would have to be  accurate enough. The Palm and DSi work great, but when it comes to drawing or writing I find them a bit frustrating, turning my bad writing into an barely readable scrawl and the delay between the pen and when it appears can hamper the free-flowing nature of drawing. But at least then I could write and annotate ebooks and stuff I manage to get on the device, or draw on-the-fly maps for gaming sessions.

I could live with all those things, with but one change. The price.

Man I wouldn’t pay more than 200 euros (that’s about 270 US dollars at current conversion rates) for a device like the iPad. Sure I could imagine forking out 300-400 euros perhaps for the top of range one with the 3G feature. I bought a Wii for more than 200, but then I was excited about the Wii and I bought in full knowledge I was paying more than the value that I would get out of it. (Even the Wii does flash, mostly). So I get the fan-boy lust for the iPad, honestly I do.

On the other hand, I forked over quite a lot of money for my laptop when I bought it. Much more than I could really afford at the time. That laptop is now 10 years old and I’m still using it every day to do the internet-thing, write and program and create. It’s starting to show it’s age these days, but it’s still got life in it. I got my value out of it, I’m still getting my value out of it. I’m really not sure the iPad would give me that much value. I couldn’t use it to write. I couldn’t use it to program. I could use it to read the internet, but not interact with the internet as freely as a I do with my laptop (as in I can consume the internet, but not necessarily add to the internet, due to the lack of a decent form of input).

Perhaps, truthfully, I’m just a little bit saddened to hear that the Microsoft Courier device is dead. The signs where there from the beginning though that it was just vaporware, yet I ignored them all, in the hope that the device would be made, I was that excited about its concepts. I’d probably pay more quite a bit more than the top-of-the-range iPad costs to get it.

I heard about the Courier before I heard about the iPad and really I only heard/cared about the iPad because the Courier demo shots and videos were being compared to the then rumour-only “iTablet”. I did hope that Apple, being Apple, would blow Courier concept out of the water with their iPad because the Microsoft Courier made me think that tablet PCs could indeed be the future, the perfect digital companion device. The fact that it was able to handle input via fingers and pen-based so I could get the accuracy of using a pen for writing notes and drawing and it’s model for working (clipping images from webpages and ebooks into “infinite journals” for example) would argument and even replace stuff I do using paper. I use printouts with written notes and paper notebooks with lots of diagrams in my work and I’m not a fancy shoe designer (I’m a programmer). The Courier would be able to handle all that digitally for me and even add more value to it. The iPad would not, in anyway, add value to the things I already do. Sure it might be useful as an entertainment device, but I want a little more I guess. With the Courier, I could have dropped my sketchbook and pens, my large notebook and wads of paper-based stuff and even my DSi and left them out of my “man-bag” that I take everywhere. The iPad would be in addition to the stuff in my bag. It might replace my DSi (I haven’t “played” an iPad yet). But then I can slip my DSi in my pocket when I don’t want to take my bag somewhere.

Or perhaps to put it another way, I bought my Wii because it was cool. It was exciting. Even though, Nintendo operate their own version of the walled-garden and won’t allow games on it that they don’t agree with and as a father and working full time, I knew I wouldn’t have the time to get the real value of it. I have tons of games like Zelda and Resident Evil for it now but none yet that I’ve finished to the end. I have to make time in my precious spare/downtime to use the Wii, so I better enjoy it. The iPad feels like a device, I’d have to make time to use as it has been hyped as a “new category of consumer devices” and I saw one review describe it as “an itch you didn’t know you needed to scratch”. Do I really want to pay so much for another something to consume my time without producing anything?

That’s just my feeling of course, you are free to disagree with me. But personally, I think I’ll have to wait a while until tablet devices really make me excited again.

Related Posts:

• A Frustrating Day
• Timelessness
• I think I found the perfect tablet device for me, just hope it’s not vapourware
• I failed at NaNoWriMo 2011, but it isn’t all bad
• My initial impressions on the Nintendo’s 3DS

I know, I haven’t been blogging. Many excuses that no-one cares about. To fill the void that is this blog, here is a recent post I made on lostheroesrpg.com. Enjoy!

I’ve been working my way through the current draft of the setting. I had hoped this would only take a week or two, but it’s taken much longer for various IRL reasons (including a car crash and its subsequent fallout), mostly because the only time I can work on it, is the few hours spare I get after the kids are in bed and I’m not always as mentally focused at that time. (I’m getting old, I fall asleep in the sofa at 10.30 in the evening!)

The first half of the text required a lot more re-work than later pieces, yet it was the later pieces I struggled with the most first time round. It seems as a general rule, depending on the length of the chapter, the more I struggled with it the less re-working it requires. With that in mind I started working on the Pantheon chapters in reverse order, hoping to populate the better changes and feel from the later chapters back to the previous chapters.

It was only when I got to the chapter on Demons that something started to worry me. Not the writing, but something I had put to the back of my mind since starting this run. Demons are nasty things. Not nasty as in anti-hero way (like Vampires are sorta cool yet there still “monsters”) but the worst of mankind, supernaturally empowered. Rapists, murderers, abusers, molesters and so on. While it’s possible to create “good” Demons (Fallen Demons or Demonic Bloodlines that avoided the influence of Hell for example), the vast majority of character types are bad, real bad.

Lets get this out of the way now, Lost Heroes is based on old mythologies. These old religions contain stuff that modern readers may find tasteless or even offensive. I can already think of several bits and pieces that might offend some. I’m aware of them but I didn’t want to PC-ify these old stories, just for the sake of writing an RPG. So instead I tried to emphasis some over others. I don’t know if this works or if I should be more cautious in how I treat these themes in the setting. In part, this is the purpose of trying to make this “Book of the Gods” so that I can present something to others and get a real feel for the reader’s reactions. To put it another way, when does editing become censorship? I can’t tell because I’m buried in the forest, checking the bark on each of the trees.

And here I am, reading through the Demons chapter, realising there is very little balance to this chapter. It is dark and it remains dark. There is, preceding this chapter, an chapter on Angels who battle constantly with Hell to prevent Demons destroying everything. While some parts of Angels are dark, there is much light. When I was writing it, I tried to get my head into what might be the motivations of these Demons and their masters. It did haunt my dreams for a while, imaging the horrific nature of Hell, but I felt it was important to get it down on paper. A starting point.

One thing, from the beginning, of Lost Heroes is that I didn’t want to restrict your choice of characters. Of course a GM may apply their own restrictions for the sake of the game, but I wanted there to be a choice. Even if that option was only really available to allow the GM to create antagonistic NPCs, it should be there. Choice is also an incredible important theme in the setting. Everything is about choice. A True Chosen Demon… is a human who accepted to become a Demon. The evils of Demon are the evils of humans, amplified by the supernatural. Do you chose to be the monster or the hero? And so the gamer is already making a choice.

Reading about the monstrous Demons of Lilith, wife of Satan, I started to have doubts. I posted this on twitter:

Just re-read the Demons chap. in Lost Heroes. Am a bit worried that u can create evil and disturbing demons as PCs. Should I take chap. out?

Which it later got imported into Google Buzz where some discussion occurred.

I have no conclusions so far. I’m going to keep tapping away at this drop, hoping in the end that the bits will fall together. What do you think?

Related Posts:

• Wordcount
• A free roleplaying game: Lost Heroes is available online right now
• I failed at NaNoWriMo 2011, but it isn’t all bad
• Just to balance out my previously slightly depressing post about tabletop gaming…
• Is it really coming to the end of Table top roleplaying?

So I’m going on holidays tomorrow, for a goodly period of time (but not too long). Can’t wait to get out of here and stop worrying about the recession, work, weather and everything else for a little bit.

I’m looking forward to it, not least because it’s time with my family but also because it’s time I get to indulge my creative hobbies, normally my drawing, writing and coding. No deadlines, no plans. In fact I finished off my One Month Fudge Adventure Challenge early because having a deadline was definitely focusing me but to the exclusion of all my other creative interests. Of course my family takes first place in practically everything (and I can’t wait to see my daughter again as she went ahead to spend a week or two with her French granny), but there generally enough time to get into stuff I don’t do at home.

I’m bringing my trusty/quirky 10-years-old laptop with me, but I won’t have internet access or even local TV. That’s fine for me. I’ll have a local webserver installed, so if I feel like it, I may work on TDO-Mini-Forms WordPress plugin (not bug fixes though, but additional features and refactoring). I’ll have my sketchpad, pencils, paints and bright clear weather to work by. I already have a number of projects I’d love to attempt. And my old laptop with OpenOffice and an install of Bazaar allows me to write away with few worries (and I have a score of ideas and projects just waiting to be cracked open). I’ll even have the time to read tens of books, compared to the measly one or two books every few months I do the rest of the year.

I’ve also been recently getting into twitter (@thedeadone) and using it quite a bit, more so then I blog. But I’ve found I can twitter from my underpowered non-iPhone mobile so I may be sending some tweets and pics from my holidays. I’ve even setup my WordPress blog (so that I can post from my phone too (thanks to a cool plugin called postie), so possible expect some short updates and photos here.

See you in a while!

Related Posts:

• I’m back two weeks already? My my my…
• 3 weeks of holidays isn’t enough!
• For fun or for success?
• Forgive me Internet, for I have been lax. It has been over six months since I did any work on TDO Mini Forms…
• Grab a beta release of TDO Mini Forms, if you dare!

I don’t particularly won’t to post to complain about being sick. I’m not bad or in a dangerous condition, but I’ve been hit by a continual stream of colds, flus and infections this winter. I’m genuinely frustrated by it and it’s been the whole family, not just me. This recent one I got from my young son and the two of us have been at home all week till today and last week was certainly no picnic.

So if I haven’t responded to comments or emails, please understand. I will get through the backlog in time.

I haven’t been able to do much work on any of my projects including TDO Mini Forms and Lost Heroes, my drawings, gaming or even spend time just reading. I have been just about keeping up on my TV watching (for another post I think). So apologise for my invisibility over the last week. I’m hoping, with the sun showing in the clouds more and more, I’ll be able to get back into things quickly.

Best of health to everyone!

Related Posts:

• For fun or for success?
• Wordcount
• Going on holidays tomorrow!
• A Frustrating Day
• Dead Desktop PC = More Drawings