grahambinns.com

Well, the muse seems to have deserted me today, so it's back to editing the Muse manuscript instead. I got through a chapter of edits last night - the dramatic bits were okay; it was the bits in between that needed refining - and I'm now at 77 out of 333 pages edited. You can see the count on the right hand side of the page.

In-between the bursts of editing (you can only concentrate on your own prose for so long, I find, before you need to take a break) I'm watching the countdown to the shuttle launch on NASA TV. At the moment the clock is at T -9 minutes and holding, and unlike yesterday's countdown, which I was alternating with the cricket - well done to England by the way - at work, it sounds like everything is go for launch. For a sci-fi space junkie this is good news.

In other news, the non-explosive battery for my laptop arrived this morning. This is especially good timing as I'm going to be travelling down to London for work this week, and I didn't feel particularly like blowing up the train when I plugged my laptop in. The new battery charged remarkably quickly, however, which makes me somewhat suspicious. Perhaps I'm just being over-cautious but I think I might have to give it a few charge-discharge cycles before I'm sure that it's working properly. The nice people at Dell have also sent me a jiffy bag and a UPS label for the old battery, so I can get rid of it without worrying about losing any necessary or, indeed, unnecessary limbs.

And now, back to work.

Well hello!

What do you mean 'who the hell are you?' It's me!

Um... yeah. Been away a while haven't I? Not quite a month, but it's getting on for being that long. Oh well, we can but press on, can we not?

Consider this an apology, then, for my extended absence from the blogosphere. It was mostly, in fact entirely, due to the pressures of work. I was working on a project that somehow managed to have me working until one o'clock most mornings, as well as most weekends too, and somewhat unsurprisingly I found that rather sapping in terms of both energy and time to blog and, even more importantly, write. But that's no longer a problem, for once again I have moved jobs, though I'm not going to say more here for the sake of keeping such things off a public blog.

With a little luck and a bit of common sense, the move should mean that I can return to my writing schedule, which I've sadly neglected since the end of April. In terms of what to get done I'm going to start working on the novel edits again last week. I can't remember where I'm up to on those, so I'm going to have to start over, which will probably mean that I'll spot some more problems.

I'm going to start small, I think. I've got out of the practice of writing 1,500 - 2,000 words a day, so I'm going to start small and may use of my Writer's Block to get me back up to my old productiveness. Watch this space.

At least I'm not dead, which I'm sure you'll agree is a good thing.

"Aha!" I hear you all cry, "An update at last!"

Well, yes. And yes, I'm going to stick my usual excuse in, which is "Busy, very busy." Also, I've developed a stinker of a head cold, which has left my sinuses filled with something not unakin to that white, fish-smelling glue that they give you to use in Primary school; the stuff that boys have endless fun making fake skin with in order to peel it off in front of some unsuspecting compatriot, usually female, always squeamish, just for fun. I'm in the happy position of having a new, full-time, salaried job. And as my day jobs all seem to go, this one has gone down the route of being hellishly busy. A deadline is looming at the end of the week and I'm having to work quite a lot of overtime to get the thing done, so once again there isn't much time for writing or editing. But that doesn't mean I'm not doing any.

I've edited the embarassingly explicit story and I'm quite happy with it. I'm probably going to give it another pass and maybe put some stuff in that I think is missing. I realised, thinking about it last night whilst trying to sleep, that although I know what's special about the main character, I've made a point of not saying it specifically in the story, wanting to let the story let the reader know in its own time. Unfortunately, I've found myself wondering if it's not a little too vague; there's a chance, I think, that people might come to completely the wrong conclusion and, if they do, that means they're not going to get the point of the story which largely... well, misses the point.

Yesterday, in a mini-splurge in Borders, I bought myself the Writer's Block (along with a couple of Python books, because writer I may be but geek I've always been; Python is my new favourite language), which I've wanted ever since I first saw it. My plan, once I've got some time, is to try and do a little work triggered by it each day, as a way of keeping my hand in the writing game and to keep my mind active. I might even post some of the stuff here for the sake of keeping you all amused when I haven't got anything better to say.

Of course, all this working and not writing (and, by extension, not posting) means that I've missed several key events during the last few days. England lost the ODI series to Sri Lanka, which I'd expected, and on the same day lost one of their greatest ever fast bowlers, Fiery Fred Trueman. Oh, and t'other England dropped out of the World Cup, though I couldn't really give two stuffs about that.

Lessee, what else did I want to comment on at the time? The anniversary of the London bombings is coming up; I'm waiting to see whether the new workplace will be any more affected than the old by it (I didn't write about it at the time because I was working there, but the Mob staff seemed disturbingly uncaring about the whole thing). If not I'll probably go into the town centre to observe the silence; it would mean more that way, somehow.

I spent this evening working with one eye on RealPlayer, which was showing NASA TV. I watched last year's launch of STS-114 and it sent chills up my spine. STS-121 was no different; I had goosebumps in places I didn't know geese could bump as Discovery roared into the sky. I'm going to have to go to the Cape some day, just to see a launch for myself (though they'll probably have retired the shuttles by the time I get there; maybe I'll go when they launch the next moonshot (pause for irony...). Oh, and PayPal cancelled my LibSyn subscription without asking me, so I'll have to set it up again if I decide to carry on podcasting. Thanks for that, PayPal people.

Anyroad. Back to work. As Fred would have said, I'll sithee.

I'm taking a semi day off today. That is to say that I've been programming for eleven days straight and so, apart from a little work on Das Projekt, today is mine. I thank you.

I really need get back to that editing thing that I used to be doing. I think you can probably guess that my tendency to take on work will prevent me finishing the edits by the end of July, maybe even the end of August, but providied I get the first round finished some time within the next couple of months I'll be semi happy.

On the subject of editing, I have some news. Whilst sat in Caffe Nero yesterday, enjoying an early morning Hazelnut Latte and a muffin healthly breakfast, I fired up my laptop and, despairing at the fact that I would have to pay a fiver for the privilege of internet access there (The Sun Hotel on Church Street, Lancaster, offers free wireless access boys and girls. You heard it here first.) I decided to take a look at some of the short stories that I had finished a while ago and ignored for almost all of the intervening time.

It turns out that they're not half bad. One of them needs major rewrites to even be coherent, one of them needs large swathes of waffle removing from it and one of them needs some characterisation tweaks, but my personal favourite was the story that I was struggling not to be embarassed about writing a few months back.

Although there are still parts of it where I find myself cringing (you remember, when you've written a pretty explicit sex scene, that people who know you will want to read it if you get it published, leading to an interesting dichotomy of the mind over whether or not to actually try), and though it also suffers from an overuse of the word 'velvety' (I used it once; it's once too many), it's actually pretty good. The ending in particular is exactly how I wanted it to be. Barring a few tweaks and some changes to get the lead character's mindset across in the way I wanted it to come, then, it's more-or-less done. I might even get it finished this weekend, given time and confidence, which would then mean that I'd have to start looking for markets for it.

The scary part is just beginning, then.

I slept later today than I meant to. For some reason, be it age or a lack of practise, staying up until past two in the morning doesn't sit well with me any more, and it left me feeling drained, hence the going back to sleep when I should be getting up and working mojo that was mine today.

Even so, due to the fact that the clients for Das Projekt are in the states and so are a minimum of five hours behind me (in fact the company I'm working for is based in Florida, five hours behind, but their clients and the ultimate end users of Das Projekt are in LA, eight hours behind. That gives me a rather neat little jump on getting things done in a day, but makes working during their afternoon times a bit tiring), I had a little free time, so I decided that I'd catch up on my editing, which I hadn't really touched upon since I first got told that I might be being made redundant some weeks back.

It didn't work quite as I'd expected.

Pre-redundancy I'd been working at a reasonably steady rate of a chapter or ten pages a day, whichever was the longer. It was fun, for the most part, and quite surprising, too. I kept finding things in the text that I couldn't for the life of me remember writing, such as the bit where I made a character polydactyl or the bit where I explained, right there in the second chapter, one of the mysteries that I thought I hadn't wrapped up until around about chapter 30 (which is why a large section of chapter two has a big line through it and "WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?" writ large in the margin, followed by a deplorable excess of punctuation).

Today, though, it was like pulling teeth. One's own teeth. With rusty pliers. And no anaesthetic.

Every word was torture to read; I couldn't get through five sentences without cringing. The dialogue seemed stilted or, worse, cribbed from some raving genius (one Whedon-esq phrase is a tip of the hat; ten on the same page are a symptom of watching too much Firefly at the time of writing).

So after a page-and-a-bit of agony I put the manuscript to one side and got on with other things, like debugging a content scheduler that won't let you schedule anything on a Sunday (ironic, really, since the project is aimed at the religiously inclined - which, given the author, is even more ironic, but I'll let you ponder that in your own time and won't bang on about it here). That, at least, worked out well.

I might go to Caffe Nero tomorrow and write for a while. That usually gets the juices flowing. Of course, I can take the laptop now, which makes the writing much quicker and easier to get down on the page. On the downside, it makes the wifi network easier to access but I might be able to resist that - it isn't free, which for once might be a blessing.

Oh, and before I leave you to your ponderings I just want to say hola to Simon Barnett - ex-housemate, co-alumnus of Lancaster University's County College (2002), resident of the UK and, because someone has to be, Yorkshireman - who recently visited this site. Hello Simon, and thank-you for coming from a county that has Jason Gillespie in its team and managed to avoid defeat by the skin of its collective bits as a result. Hope you're well ;)