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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.

A brief lull in the busyness that seems to be my lot at the moment, brought on by having just got home and additionally by waiting to see what Sarah would like to eat for tea (Lamb Kare Lomen or a green salad being the two main options), finds me sitting at the computer with thumbs-a-twiddle. So here's a blog post for you, dear reader. It'll keep us both amused for a few minutes anyway.

I don't get much free time anymore (he says, at once bemoaning how busy he is and being glad for the fact that it's earning him money). I can't blame anyone else for it, unfortunately; On one hand I'm still working on Das Projekt, which should have been finished by now but which for various reasons into which we shall not delve has not. That's mostly happening in the evenings now because during the daytime I have a new full-time position with a web development company in Kendal. On top of that, and thanks in no small part to the good-naturedness of my new employer, I'm doing a week's contract work with the Mob, the irony of which I'll leave you to ruminate on for yourselves.

All of which means, of course, that there's little time for honest-to-goodness, pen-to-paper writing work. I toy with things here and there, but I haven't had a chance for a couple of hours worth of sit-down-and-scribble for far too long. Perhaps, when I've finally done with Das Projekt, I'll give myself the chance to write. Or - better idea - I'll sit in Caffé Nero tomorrow (I'm going to be in Lancaster early) and do some writing then.

I've been toying with the idea of podcasting some of my short fiction. I have an alarmingly small collection of short stories, mainly because most of my work for the last six months has been novel-focussed, and the ones that I've got are in need of some serious polishing, but given the glut of ideas that I've been having recently I've been wondering whether I should try to find markets for them once they're written and edited, or whether I should essentially publish them myself.

I guess there's a shyness there that I don't want to admit to: it would be far easier to read my stories out to a possible audience of zero than to send them to markets who would, in my own head at the very least, tell me that the audience for my stories is definitely zero.

To which the only answer is: if you don't try, you'll never get.

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 ;)

And so it begins.

To the left, observe the first draft of Muse - or whatever it ends up being called - in all its double-spaced single-sided glory. I managed all of ten pages today - the first chapter - though it felt slightly strange, as though they weren't my words at all and it didn't matter if I was brutal.

Which I was. There was hacking and slashage. There may even have been a machete involved somewhere, I can't quite recall. Suffice it to say that I've already spotted a couple of bits that I think belong elsewhere in the text, along with the beginnings of a sub-plot that I know I didn't write about anywhere else in the whole story.

I'm going to aim for a chapter or ten pages a day, whichever is longest. If I can mange that then I should be done with the first pass hard copy edits this time next month and I'll be able to make the necessary changes, give it a polish and start passing it on to first readers before the start of June.

That's the plan anyway. Whether I stick to it or not remains to be seen. If there's one thing I've learned in the course of writing this novel (writing that word still leaves me waiting for someone to snigger at me for being so stupid as to think I could ever do such a thing) it's that the book's the boss, and the boss rarely lets things go according to plan.