I haven’t been doing enough on the Gordian Knot edit lately, but today I took a fresh look at it. And though it’s taken me quite a while I’ve come to a decision: I’m going to break one of the rules I’ve set myself and not finish this draft.

I’ve been struggling with this for a while now, but after a lot of thought I’ve had to conclude that finishing this draft just wouldn’t be worth the time it would take. The edit has been an “off and on” project for too long, and my general writing style now isn’t what it was when I started the edit, so it would never truly read as one draft anyway.

On top of that I’ve been doing quite a bit of work on, and thinking about, the stories background recently. Adding in a lot of new worldbuilding, and rethinking some of the old. Once that process is complete it will need one or two major, and a lot more minor, changes to the narrative even in its second draft form.

All of which means that, all things considered, starting over from scratch once the worldbuilding is ready seems like the right thing to do. That will finally place my characters, and their actions, in the sort of rich universe I feel I’ve only been simulating thus far.

It will mean I need to put in more time to get a new draft ready, but I’m convinced it will be a better draft as a result. I’m hoping to map out a preliminary time-line with various targets on it tomorrow. And while I can’t guarantee I’ll keep to it, my current aim is to blog more actively about the project as it progresses.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I really need to return to pondering faster than light sensor technology…

As those who follow me on twitter will know, I’ve been doing without my PC for a few days now. Not because I want to, but because my motherboard decided to short out on me. Even though this is not a nice experience, there are some positive sides to it. Granted, I’m not sure I’d see any positives if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve been able to re-purpose my file server to serve as a temporary desktop without too much trouble.

But as I do have my re-purposed file server keeping me connected to the essentials I’ve decided to do a little blog post about the surprising positives I’ve noticed in being cut off from my regular PC. Not that I’d recommend anyone get their mboard shorted out just to experience these…

Item One

I no longer have all the links I’d normally take for granted in my bookmarks, toolbar, and history. This may sound like a weird positive, but I find it is. It’s made me realise just how much of a creature of habit I really am. There are sited I visit regularly, sites I know the address off, which I simply can’t be bothered to go to when I have to actually type that address. Not bothering with those sites has left me the time to do a lot more reading than I had been doing for a while.

Item Two

Another positive thing for me is that lacking my PC has forced me to make some decisions. I’d been thinking about a Magnatune streaming membership for quite a while, but I only got around to actually getting one because I’ve been cut off from all the music that’s stored on my desktop. As a result I’ve listened to, and enjoyed, more new music in the last few days than in the previous month or so.

Item Three

Related to the missing links, but a little different, I’ve found that aside from my browsing habits my routine has also changed a little. Most the changes aren’t massive, I’ve made sure my backup desktop is now running pretty much the same software my PC normally uses, but it has made me reconsider other things – like that large number of RSS feeds I’m subscribed to, even though I mostly click “Mark All Read” because I haven’t the time to read them. I’ve already mentally scheduled a thorough RSS cleanup for when the PC is up and running again.

Looking Back

So what do I feel looking back after a few days? Well I’ll still be glad tomorrow when I can pick up my new board and get my regular PC up and running again. But even so these intervening days haven’t been as bad as I’d first thought they might be. And the replacement I’ve ordered – replacing mboard, proc & memory – is also an upgrade that should put off the need to buy a new PC entirely at least a while longer.

And of course when I do get the (upgraded) PC back up and running I can carry some of the changes to my routine made during the last few days back there. That way the crash may actually have a positive effect in the long term.

It’s been too long since my last update to this blog. I don’t know why, but every time I decide to blog more, I keep it up for a little bit and then drop off again. And my last burst of activity was, of course, no different then the others in the end. And recently there’s been Twitter, which has replaced blogging, at least in some cases. But Twitter is, in a way, also the reason I’m blogging now. Because I’ve been having fun with code again lately, and it’s thanks to Twitter.

I was somewhat intrigued at first by mentions of the Twitter API. And then I started noticing (I must have seen them before, but I’d never actually noticed) some of the various ways people display Twitter statuses on other websites. And while there were some pretty good ones, I ran into the usual problem: none of them did exactly what I wanted them to do, the way I wanted them to do it.

Granted I could have lived with some of them, but I decided it would be more fun to write my own. Which is why I’ve been blowing the dust and rust off my PHP skills recently, working on my first ever wordpress plugin. It’s not done yet, and it’s only seen limited testing, but I’m hoping to take the code public as of version 0.5. Now I just have to figure out what features I want to have in 0.5.

The main problem seems to be one of balance – which I’ve always thought is probably the main trick of life anyway. In this case the balance is between allowing the user to customise the way they want the plugin to appear, and having something that runs without the user having to (virtually) write their own plugin.

While I managed to stay out of the black hole immediately after NaNoWriMo this year, it did manage to rear it’s ugly head later in December.

For a couple of months, let’s say the second half of December through to the first half of February, I did very little writing indeed. But the last couple of weekends I’ve managed to get some decent stretches of 500 words or more in. It’s not a lot, but it’s a new start after the post-NaNo black hole.

My goal for the coming week is to try and write at least 100 words per day. Which is very little in some ways, but balancing my time to do any writing at all during the week is enough of a challenge right now. I’ve also decided that, although I usually don’t work out my plots, I do need to sit down and work out at least a couple of chapters right now.

Balancing two story lines doesn’t seem like it ought to be complicated, but getting them to keep pace (at least roughly) in story time, is proving tricky right now. That might have something to do with the relatively small blocks of writing I’m putting in. Keeping track of how much time was spent in the last visit to the other story line gets tricky when that last visit was more than a week ago for the writer.

Strange though it may seem – at least it seems strange to me – I have now owned a plant for over 2 weeks. It has survived, and what’s more, I’m pretty sure it’s grown. Based on my past history keeping plants that’s quite an accomplishment on its part.

But the fact that it’s grown is now starting to be a problem I’ll have to deal with. it seems to be getting to a point where its stalks will no longer stay upright without any help. Right now I’m not sure whether or not that’s a bad sign of some sort. Guess I’ve got some research to do.

By popular demand: a photo of the subject and I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know I’ve managed to keep myself from making it look a bit worse on purpose to pre-emptively disguise any damage living with me might do to it.

I embarked upon something of an experiment yesterday: I bought a plant. This may not seem like an earth shattering event, but up until now I’ve never really been a plant person. In fact I’m still not sure I’m a plant person.

I do however like peppermint tea, which may have contributed to the mad up welling that led me to buy a peppermint plant when I saw them on sale at the grocery store. To put this up welling even further into context: I don’t currently own any pot that is meant to have a plant kept in it.

I’ve managed to get around that (for now) by combining a washed up plastic yoghurt pot and some Duct Tape (the latter mainly for appearances sake, so that my peppermint doesn’t claim to be strawberry yoghurt).

To be perfect honest I may have been over eager in giving this phenomenon it’s own category on the blog, but my intention right now is to keep the world informed of the plant’s progress. If nothing else that will force me to occasionally remember to water it.

As for the initial report. As far as I can tell the subject of the experiment is doing fine. I’ve made sure it has plenty of water, and am reasonably confident I haven’t taken this to the point of drowning it (yet). A quick visual inspection of my thumbs doesn’t seem to show any green shading yet though.

I like what I tend to call “low impact documentaries” as my moving wallpaper when I’m home, both when I’m working on something and when I’m just trying to relax. How much I see of these can differ, which has a positive side-effect of allowing me to watch the same thing more than once, especially if I wait a while between showings.

Recently I’ve managed to get hold of a good number of episodes of the British TV series “Time Team”. It’s not 100% documentary technically, but it falls into the same sort of watching. For those who don’t know it, I’ll give a quick overview of what the show is like.

Each episode of Time Team consists of a team of archaeologists going to a site which has (usually) turned up some indications that there might be something in the past. They then do a 3 day exploratory dig to figure out what’s there. This is always limited to 3 days, which provides part of the entertainment component of the show the “will they or won’t they” excitement.

At the end of the 3 day exploration the team presents its finding to the locals or whoever called them in, and of course to the TV audience. There’s no faking the findings either, so if they find absolutely nothing that’s what they’ll have to present.

Which brings me to the episode that prompted me to blog about this show. In an episode in 2007, a dig taking place near the village of Warburton in Cheshire, the Time Team – in the words of presenter Tony Robinson did “… what we’ve always threatened, after a hundred and sixty programmes we found absolutely nothing.”

The episode had been prompted by people finding artefacts while walking a field, but in the end the field proved not to contain any detectable buildings, in fact the only real conclusion about the field was that it had been farmed since Roman times.

But that didn’t mean there weren’t valuable results. Granted I’m not an archaeologist, or even for that matter any other sort of historian. But even so I think I know enough to know that a negative result doesn’t mean no result. By finding out that all the objects found in the field were – in the words of the show – “the background scatter of history” it managed to show that finds in the topsoil don’t mean there has to be something major underneath.

Which I suppose, or at least hope, is part of the explanation for why I like shows like this. There may be an entertainment component in them. And they don’t, generally, even claim to be the greatest form of discovery in history. But they do deal with real evidence and real science, and I like that in a show.

I’ve been looking back at 2008 recently. During my annual wake of course, but also during other moments. And one of the things that I realised is this: I’ve seen almost no TV commercials for a year now. I haven’t watched a lot of TV, and I’ve gotten good at avoiding the commercials when I do (some sort of sixth sense allows me to hit mute at pretty much the right time, and come back without missing too much, having done something else during the actual commercial break).

But the main reason I haven’t seen a lot of commercials isn’t that I’ve gotten so good at avoiding them when I watch TV. The main reason really is that I just don’t watch a lot of TV. What I do watch tends to be BBC a lot, which doesn’t really have commercials, so that’s a further bonus, but the main change, just over a year ago now, was that I re-evaluated what I would and wouldn’t watch on TV.

The basic premise when I sat down to take another good look (if you’ll pardon the pun) at my TV habits was this: would I miss a show enough to record it if I couldn’t be home during an airing, all shows that didn’t meet this basic criterion were immediately axed. Then I decided to go a step further: if my recording failed for some reason, would I mind enough to start trying to download it. Again all shows that garnered a “well if I actually need to spend time looking for it…” got the chop.

I was left with surprisingly little TV too watch once I’d applied those two, and over time I’ve refined it a bit further. I will still watch some shows that don’t make the grade, just as background filler, but about the only place I’ll watch them is the BBC, because there at least I can watch them without commercials. It’s not hard and fast, but it doesn’t need to be to cut out an awful lot of more or less useless time spend in front of the telly. Which gives me more time to find interesting stuff online, or to read (not that I’ll ever have enough time to allow me to read everything I would like to, but at least this allows me to come a little closer than I would otherwise).

It’s 00:55, the new year is less than an hour old, and the fireworks, having receded to just occasional bangs at least a quarter of an hour back, now seem to have gone almost completely. It’ll be sporadic for another few hours, I know that much from experience, but a point of rest is approaching, which means it’s high time to get this blog entry written – though as it’s being written on my PDA it will have to wait a while a before it’s published.

What else can I say about the present moment? I’m at my father’s house for newyears. And I’m the only one still up. I’m sitting by myself in a darkened livingroom. I could, no doubt, put more light on, but for now I prefer to have just a few candles, and the light of my PDA screen as I write this post. The year is now exactly one hour old, and the fireworks are sputtering occasionally outside.

There is a reason I’m sitting here in the darkness, waiting for quiet. It’s not just to write this blog post – it’s important, but not thta important (sorry) – but it’s to do with the fact that I’m still up. In fact I’m highly unlikely to go to sleep any time soon, or indeed before the evening of January first. The only way that’s going to happen is if I really find I can’t last the night.

You see, for the past few years I haven’t slept between the morning of December 31st and the evening of January 1st. Instead I stay up. It started partly when I noticed that New Year’s eve was no longer special. Staying up past midnight is routine for me, in fact sleeping beforer midnight tends to be more special. But just doing something special on this night, something as special as being up until midnight felt when I was younger isn’t the only thing.

There’s something strange, almost magical, about being up in the deepest part of the night, when all human life around you sleeps. It’s as though certain thoughts only come at the times when the brain isn’t usually awake to receive them. A facet of that thought is expressed by Susan Ivanova, in the Babylon 5 epside “The Hour Of The Wolf”, which also mentions quite specifically the moment I too have found to be the “hotspot” for nightly insight: the hour between 03:00 and 04:00 in the morning.

To put it another way, with a slight hint of melodrama if you’ll permit me: always be careful around mirrors between 03:00 and 04:00, at that time of night chances are you actually will see yourself if you looki n them, not just the faint copy they usually show you. And like all insights gained by waking through the night that may be useful, but if it comes at you while you’re unwary, it may not always be welcome.

It’s ten minutes past one now, and the fireworks have fizzled out even further, so I’ll call it quits for this blog entry. The new year has started, and so, for me, has a new wake to ponder what’s happened in the last, and what may happen in the new. It’s an odd habit, and probably not “the thing” for everyone, but I find it works for me.

Update 04:00 – I’ve made it through the most important part of the wake, and am now about to do something I haven’t done for a few years: go to bed. Not to sleep, at least that’s not the intention, but just to lie down. My back’s been acting up the last few days, and it’s starting to again now. Lying on the sofa isn’t going to cut it so I’m going to risk the bed.

Update 09:00 – Just as I’m posting this I’ve been up again for an hour or so. I don’t think I really slept, though I may have dozed of a little bit once or twice. Most of the time was spent in contemplation as intended though, and my back is certainly feeling better than it was about 5 hours ago.