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My writing mojo appears to have deserted me. Which, whilst not being the first time it's happened, true, and whilst it certainly won't be the last, is disconcerting nonetheless.

A couple of weeks ago I was flying with novel-the-second (which has now taken on the title of After Life, though I'm not sure that that really fits) and I was churning out a respectable though not huge amount of words a day. This last week, though, I've been struggling, though it's more about the struggle to get started than it is about the struggle to write once the pen finally hits the paper.

Perhaps I'm just short on ye-olde brain-juice. It's been a while since I took a break from work, writing and all the rest, and whilst I don't feel like I need to escape from work (another first for Canonical; usually it takes about a month for me to start feeling tired) I am finding it hard to negotiate the after-work bits of the day, which includes writing time.

Which perhaps makes this rather good timing after all, because on Monday Sarah and I are off to Dublin for a few days of rest, relaxation, music, walking, photography and Guinness.

I've only been to Dublin once before, and then only for a day when we were in Wales and decided that at a tenner each a ferry ticket wasn't a bad buy, but it seems like one of those really vibrant cities where even the quiet bits have a bubbling current of liveliness running beneath the surface. I wonder if we'll find any stories there; I'm absolutely certain we'll at least find plenty of characters, which is half the battle.

I've bought one of the Dublin Moleskine city notebooks for our trip. I'm not convinced that it's necessarily a good buy - yet another notebook to fill with my mindless drivel when I've got plenty of them already, plus a blog, plus, well, just about any conversation I happen to come into contact with - and I don't know that our few days away will make for a particularly interesting travel journal but I'm willing to give it a shot at least. And it's kinda sweet, I think, to record the holiday on paper. Not that I won't be taking tons of photographs, but I often wish when I look back on old holiday snaps that I could recall the other bits, the thoughts I had when I crested that particular rise in the sand dunes on Wales and saw the cargo container that had been washed up on the beach, the feelings I had when I first saw Edingburgh from the castle, that sort of thing.

For all that I've said that I'm struggling for inspiration, though, I have got a story buzzing round in my head. Well, it's not a story so much as a title and a few paragraphs that don't as yet really go anywhere. Perhaps I'll work on Jenny Greenteeth's Birthday Cake instead of After Life for a bit.

Sounds like a plan.