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Seth Godin sums up the starting-a-story problem perfectly:

That Moment

When you are sitting right on the edge of something daring and scary and creative and powerful and perhaps wonderful... and you blink and take a step back. That's the moment. The moment between you and remarkable. Most people blink. Most people get stuck. All the hard work and preparation and daring and luck is nothing compared with the ability to not blink.

A couple of nights ago, without really realising what I was doing, I wrote the opening paragraphs for novel-the-second, or at least something like them. And looking at the above quote I realise: I've already taken the first step. Now its just a matter of putting the words on the paper. No excuses.

Whatever you do, don't blink (with apologies to Steven Moffat).

For someone who's officially between jobs at the moment I'm finding myself surprisingly busy. Or perhaps I'm just finding way to make myself surprisingly busy, which, when I think about it, would be surprisingly unsurprising (or rather unsurprisingly unsurprising).

That said, I've managed to get some novel-the-second work done. I spent a lot of time listening to Mike Stackpole's twenty-one days to writing a novel podcasts last week in the hope of picking up some advice about what I did wrong when I was writing Muse-that-was, or at least on how to make my life easier this time around. Whilst I didn't find everything that I was looking for (for example, I'm not much for outlining beyond a sort of rough sketch of the story) it did give me some hints about how to go about getting to know my characters.

It's funny, actually, that it's taken me so long to get to the point where I'm getting people down on paper. For someone who's trying to write one or more novels I'm remarkably reticent to do half of the things that people suggest you do in order to get that hundred thousand words written.

My usual bible for writing is Stephen King's On Writing, which pretty much eschews the idea of outlining in favour of the story shaping itself. Whilst I'm sure that that's a pretty good idea, because stories are living things and not easy to force into one given shape or another, it's not something that I've found easy to do. Like any other writer I run out of steam at times, and its at those moments that you need something to keep you reasonably on track. This is where outlines, however vague, come in.

So the moleskine notebook that I bought a while back - well, one of them anyway - is filling up with character notes, motivations, possible conflicts and so on. There are three characters taking shape at the moment: the hero, who so far remains resolutely nameless, a female not-quite-lead, not-quite-background character who will, if I'm right about how her particular story will unfold, have a powerful effect on the aforementioned hero, and a second male character who is so vague as to be utterly unhelpful, but is at least vague for the reason that he himself is a very vague, odd kind of person.

The latter two are the only ones who have faces and definite presences in my mind, which is rather annoying. I'd much rather that I knew what my hero looked like. Maybe he'll become clearer the further I get.

I still don't quite know when I'm going to start actually writing the thing yet, though it looks like Stackpole's twenty-one days might not actually be that far off the mark. I guess we'll see.

This post was supposed to be about TV and the quality thereof and has ended up not being, which is also surprisingly unsurprising. 

Looks like we're up-and-running. Bon. The DNS propogation took longer than I expected, partly because the update didn't go out until 9:30 GMT, which I'd managed to not notice. Anyway, seems like everything works (for the time being at least), so I'll call it a win.

There are still a couple of tweaks that I need to make, but they're mostly on the back end, so you won't see them. For the most part though, Django handles things admirably, which makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. Doing the development work for this site - and in turn learning how to use Django - has been a lot of fun, so I'm going to keep playing with it; you might find you see a lot more tech-oriented posts on here now as a result.

That's not to say, however, that I'm not still making things up; on the contrary, I'm steeling myself to start on Novel-the-second in the very near future (probably next week or the week after). It's just a case of getting all if my creative ducks in a row (it's the shooting them part that worries me). I've got plenty of ideas and plenty more to come but I can't help feeling that if I don't start now one of two things is going to happen:

1. I'll spend all my time world-building and writing down ideas and not actually write any prose or
2. Someone else will write the story before I do.

And now I need to fiddle with my Python.

[Edit]

Before I forget, props must go to Simon Willison , whose blog introduced me to Django (he co-created it) and whose django_openidconsumer library I used as a replacement my own, less comprehensive OpenID consumer implementation. Many thanks Simon.