grahambinns.com

I should know better than to not save my drafts before trying out some new feature of Firefox that I've never tried before. Grr.

Tempted as I am, though, to file the just-lost post under "Fuck it, I'll do it later" I'll try to start again.

Where was I? Oh yes.

I have lots to be getting on with this weekend. For one thing the Manchester Starbucks Session didn't yield nearly as much actual work done as I'd hoped it would. This was mainly due to the fact that, as I mentioned, I seemed to have been stricken with a self-inflicted bout of the lurgi, and as such spent my first hour in Starbucks in a semi-incoherent state, staring out of the windows like a zombie and occasionally gibbering. I didn't, however, eat anyone's brains (so far as I remember at least), which is a plus point.

Once perked up by a large and cheerfully cheap mug of peppermint tea (an apparent cure for all my ails, though one which had hitherto lain undiscovered) I managed to get five hundred words written before Sarah returned from her travels and it was time to go to Wagamama for food. Five hundred is better than none, true, but I had been hoping to get more words written - something in the range of fifteen hundred would have been nice. Still, as has been said, beggars can't be choosy and writers have only themselves to blame.

So I've got to get caught up on the word count today, and though I've given up all hope of getting to the 100,000 word mark by Thursday I'm still hopeful that I'll get to be somewhere in the general area of it. The trouble is that I've got a lot to get done today, including some UML design stuff for work that I didn't get a chance to finish during last week. There's also an short story that came to me yesterday and is begging to be written. I don't know whether that's something that I ought to do at this point, close as I am to finishing the novel, so I'm going to wrestle it into a notebook and hope that it stays quiet until I'm done. As if that weren't enough to be getting on with, I've got a podcast to get out, though you'll have noticed that I'm no longer making the stupid mistake of making promises about when it's going to come out. Perhaps that can be one of the features of A Sprinkling of Hippo Dust: regular irregularity, as it were.

Anyway, to work. Otherwise I'll start talking about all the new and shiny things that I want to buy, and then we'd be here all bloody day.

Wherein our hero wishes all his (few but precious) listeners a happy new year and talks about his presence. Or is that presents? (Ah, the old ones are the bad ones, aren't they?).

Links from the show:

• Aspinal of London
• mp3players.co.uk

Delayed until Monday at the earliest. Too tired to even write, let alone record a podcast.

But I passed 70,000 words (miniw00t), so not all's bad in the world.

Have a great Christmas/Yule/Kwanzaa/Hanukkah/Give-me-stuff-day, whatever your religious leanings or inclinations. See you later.

Wherein our hero emerges from the depths of November into the light of coming Christmas (that sounds far too religious; I apologise) and talks about honesty and truth in fiction, why it's not an oxymoron and why it's important, and also reveals his (very tenuous) link to a certain 25ft-tall Gorilla.

No links this week. I rambled on without any external help whatsoever.

Apologies for the slightly tinny sound. Something to resolve for next time, that is.

Download Fit the Fourth | Subscribe to the feed | Subscribe to the Odeo Channel

I would be recording Fit the Fourth of A Sprinkling of Hippo Dust right now, except that I noticed this morning that I needed to move my root partition onto a different hard drive. The terminal telling me that I had run out of space on the original drive was a big hint.

So here I am, working in the ever useful DSL, copying things from partition to partition and, in the process, reminding myself just how much crap I've installed.

So the podcast will be here, but late, I'm afraid. I'm sure you'll live.