grahambinns.com

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.

Hello good travellers. I'm here at the Birmingham Conservatoire, utilising the suprisingly good conference WiFi at PyConUK . Bon.

It's lunch time on day one and my morning agenda so far has covered SQLAlchemy (cool but for me redundant at the moment), Twisted (pretty cool but I need to know more) and PyPy (very cool), the talk about which was presented by Mike Hudson, one of my Canonical colleagues and one of the PyPy developers from back when it was getting funded.

I'm not a huge fan of conferences. For one thing they usually a) necessitate being away from home, b) as a result of a. mean staying in a crummy hotel, c) have crummy wifi at best and d) put me to sleep. So far I'm pleased to say that PyConUK has only fulfilled points a and b, neither of which are their fault.

Incidentally, I've discovered once again that hotel wifi, when not included in the room rate (as it usually is for work) is stupidly expensive. And, again, crummy.

Of course the upshot of wearing the developer pants is that the writer pants are on the hanger and may not get worn this weekend, which is a disappointment for me. I had planned to do some novel-the-second outlining to try and ensure that I keep on track; the story has lost focus a bit in the last chapter and I'm having trouble finding a way to get the protagonist into the next chapter. Maybe that's something to be fixed on the train home.

The other upshot of wearing the developer pants is that I have a huge desire to hack at things. PylibMTP, django_(xml)rpc and grahambinns.com version 0.2 all need work. I just don't quite know where the time's going to come from. Oh, and I have things to do for work, too, which of course have to come first (because, you know, I like to buy food).

There are far too many of these these days. I don't know whether it's the fact that I'm working that's done it - as I think I've said before working from home and tracking your own time tends to make you that little bit more honest, which means I don't really want to waste my time writing blog posts when there's work to be done (although to be fair when I'm working I'm so busy as to not be thinking too much about blogging at all, which is a very pleasant change).

Working on Launchpad, and for Canonical in general, is an entirely new experience. Working with a team of people who are spread across the globe, from home, managing your own time and doing really cool stuff at the same time... It doesn't come much better. Add onto that the fact that the team with which your working is crammed full of seriously smart people who really care about their work and as far as I'm concerned you can just about stick it at the top of every job list you can find.

It's hard to switch off, sometimes. I'm spending eight or nine hours a day in front of my PC and then, coming downstairs at night, often find myself picking up my laptop and picking up where I left of with whatever Bazaar branch I happen to have been working on. The only reason I didn't do it tonight was that I was feeling particularly frazzled (and yet the temptation is still there).

Not that this is a bad thing. I used to think that it was. Back when I was working at the Mob the last thing I'd want to be doing is picking up work when I get home. But with Launchpad I want to keep working because I want to squeeze every drop of good code out of my day that I can.

Which only leaves writing, of course. Originally, when I was offered the position with Canonical, I thought that I would write in the mornings, either by getting up early and writing before work or by writing from, say, nine to ten in the morning and working until seven. Instead, I've found that I'm doing the most writing between six and eight in the evening, and though that isn't my ideal - I'd be much happier if I could actually get out of bed in the morning and do the writing when I'm at my freshest but that's a whole different problem - I've been making good progress.

When I started working on novel-the-second I told myself that needed to start small. "Don't try too hard," I told myself, mindful of the lessons of NaNoWriMo back in '05, where I nearly burned myself out after a couple of days and ended up writing a 50,000 word lump with which I'm still not happy. "Don't try to run before you can walk."

So I settled down with the book in which I'm writing the book and told myself that if I wrote five pages a day to start with I'd be well on the way soon enough. I usually fit 100-150 words on a page, so to start with, considering I haven't written a huge amount recently, I figured that ~500 words a day was pretty good going. To keep myself honest and to try and make sure I didn't slack I decided to use the Jerry Seinfeld productivity method, which basically involves a ridiculously large wall chart (nicked from Sarah's stock of it's-the-start-of-a-new-year-let's-give-things-away wall charts, which she's accumulated from the various teacher-related organisations of which she's a member), a felt-tip pen and a cross on the chart for every day that I actually write something. So far it's working. I've missed a few days (I started by writing FAIL in for those days bug gave up when I realised that just leaving them empty carried more weight of guilt), and I'm not happy about it, but the crosses are mounting up, which can only be a good thing.

And now, after a week of 500-odd word days, I'm starting to itch for more. Instead of giving myself five pages to write, I want to write ten. I want to keep writing until my wrist cramps up and my ideas run out and then I want to rest for a while and come back to it as soon as I can. I haven't felt this good about writing in a long time, and it's a beautiful feeling.

And you know what? If I were working for the Mob I don't reckon I'd be getting this much done. 

(Click to embiggen.)

And so it begins. And I'm scared. Scared as hell.

Should be fun... 

RAID5 is quite reliable as disk arrays go. So I can understand why having two disks in a five-disk array fail on Thursday morning took my hosts, Servelocity, somewhat by surprise. Which is the quick way of saying exactly what happened to the site over the last four-and-a-bit days.

There, that was painless, wasn't it?

Elsewhere, I appear to be stuffing my hours full of more minutes than they can feasibly cope with, or at least that's how it feels. For one thing, work-wise, we're mid-release cycle, and though there's a bit of a lull for me at the moment for logistical reasons I know it'll pick up to insanely busy levels towards the end of the week (perversely, I'm rather looking forward to it).

Writing-wise... Well, let's gloss over that by simply saying that I haven't done any of it for about three weeks. In fact the last time I did any writing that wasn't an email or a blog post or a hastily scribbled plot note for novel-the-second was in the Starbucks on Horseferry Road. I wrote a few paragraphs of a short story called, tentatively, Branches and rather enjoyed it and then I got tied up with work and haven't really had time to go back to it. And once again I find myself thinking that I should get back to writing but more specifically that I should get on with writing novel-the-second before it turns into the novel-I-meant-to-write that all wannabe writers have tucked away at the back of their minds. That thought terrifies me, frankly; it's too good a story to waste (though I'm not yet sure that I can do it justice). Trouble is, Branches is pretty good so far, too, especially since it's my first foray into hard(er) core Science Fiction.