It won't amaze you to know that I'm suffering from typically acute insomnia at the moment. My body's tired - I can feel my eyelids wanting to close, my eyes itching and my limbs becoming ever more leaden - and yet my brain doesn't want to switch off. I close my eyes to sleep but endless permutations of lighting setups, poses, camera tricks and overdone stagings of outlandish concepts fly past behind my eyelids, like I'm riding on a flatbed truck down the motorway at a hundred miles an hour, the lights a blur in the night above my head.

Were I a writer of comics I would anthropormorphise my insomnia, give him a doctorate and make him the nemesis of my protagonist, whom I would call Morpheus in an obvious but pathetic attempt to cash in on the fading glory of The Matrix, whilst to the cognoscenti I would also be invoking Gaiman and Greek mythologies of the dream lands that I, thanks to the evil Doctor and his cunning plans, can not inhabit, at least for these few hours of the deep morning.

It is at this point, dearest reader, that you'll probably be wondering if I've taken any drugs to help me sleep, because heaven knows I'm starting to write as though I have. The answer to your unasked question is no, I haven't. The proposition remains attractive, but since the only substance available to me in any quantity is Cocodamol, and since that only serves to give me a vaguely floaty feeling, I'm so far avoiding venturing down the road of adding anything to my body which it doesn't actually need to have.

So, to while away the time between now and sleep, I'm going to talk to you about inspiration.

Two books that I've been reading recently (long time readers will know that I scatter half-read books around the house in rather the same way that a squirrel buries acorns) have given me a massive amount of inspiration, so because we're here and you're listing, let me tell you about them.

The first book is David duChemin's Within the Frame. It's my wish list for some time, and I finally bought it a couple of weeks back after reading a recommendation from Zack Arias. It's changed the way I view my photography, and every time I feel low and the little voice tells me what a waste of time my trying to be a photographer is, that I should put the gear away and sell it and take the money and do something I'm actually good at, I find myself coming back to Within the Frame and taking away from it inspiration and confidence that I never thought I could have.

It's the kind of book that I can only read in small chunks. Not because the text is particularly dense or technical, but because the concepts explained in it are so fundamental that I need time to digest them. Often, they're also pretty obvious, or at least I think so after having read them, and I need time to go away and to stop kicking myself for not having recognised them sooner.

The second book, and the one that sings in my head every time I pick it up is Phillippe Petit's To Reach the Clouds.

For the benefit of the link-averse, a quick explanation of why this book matters at all. Phillippe Petit is the French high-wire artist who, in August 1974, walked a wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. It was a feat of skill, yes, and daredevillry, but most of all to me it was a feat of imagination, of an artist finding the ultimate way to express himself.

Reading Petit's book is a frenetic experience. I bought it after seeing the film based upon it, Man on Wire, earlier this summer, and I remember being glued to my seat as watching this madcap Frenchman explain poetically, frantically, how he and his friends had come up with the plan for "Le coup." The book is much the same, except that Petit's rapid fire, lyrical way of talking is so much more obvious when printed. It carries you along, singing you this tale of derring-do that could never happen in a modern, security-gone-mad world.

And the reason the book resonates with me is that Petit had so many crises of faith on his way to that walk amongst the clouds. His faith in himself, in his ability, in the abilities of his friends and co-conspirators all wavered and waned and crumbled at some point. And yet he kept going.

These two books have proved invaluable to me over a difficult couple of weeks, creatively speaking. DuChemin's because it explains that all photographers doubt themselves (in the same way that all writers doubt themselves and all Launchpad developers doubt themselves, I've no doubt) and how to deal with those doubts, and Petit's because he draws you into the real, visceral nature of those fits of self-loathing and disappointment and shows you, in a mirror, the little voice inside yourself that tells you you're no good, before kicking the little voice in its gentleman's area and getting the hell on with it anyway.

And that's what I need to do. Get the hell on with it. Keep buggering on.

And maybe, just maybe, if I'm very, very lucky, I'll get some sleep whilst I'm at it.

Thanks for reading.

It's been one of those weird weeks. I started it full of energy and excitement and I'm ending it feeling drained, uninspired and empty.

Countdown started really well; the first twelve days were a breeze to get shots for and I loved producing the video (though fighting with kdenlive wasn't always the most fun thing in the world). The last couple of days, though, I've felt like I was really stretching for ideas, pushing some artistic impulse within me further than it wanted to go. It became more about getting so many shots for the day than about capturing a mood, or a scene, or the play of light on on the surface of the sea. I stopped caring about the image within the frame and started measuring my success by how many frames I'd captured that I was at least partly happy with.

My ModelMayhem account was approved, thanks to a combination of the shots that I took of Sarah a couple of weeks back and the shots that I got at the Bert Stephani workshop in London. I don't know if I'll actually use it, though. The miserable, tired, self-doubting part of me that is now rearing its head wonders why a model would want to work with such a hack of a photographer.

And I know all this is nonsense; just the product of a tired mind that's had a long week of trying to squeeze as much out of every day as possible. I'll sleep some over the weekend and I'll go out into town without the pressure of having to get back for work and I'll find my creative juices starting to flow again.

But here, right now, in this head, sustained creativity is hard. And I wonder how I'm ever going to get to the point where I can do this long-term.

It's interesting how the number of people subscribing to this blog dropped by almost half after I published this mosiac of my photos from the anti Prop8 protest in Boston and this rant about the Bishop of Lancaster. In actual fact it looks like FeedBurner can no longer see the number of Livejournal-based subscribers to this feed (whether LJ reports them correctly or not I don't know without seeing a sample request), but the correlation is amusing (and a nice way to illustrate how you can prove anything, including the stick-up-the-arse-ness of people, with statistics).

Anyway...

I had entirely intended to write this as a 2008 end-of-year ooh-look-what-I-did post. Then 2008 stopped happening and 2009 started happening and I thought I could write it as a ooh-look-what-I'm-going-to-do post. Then I decided that it was too much fun having a holiday from work and blogging and, well, pretty much everything else, and I stopped trying to write it and enjoyed not doing much for a week or so.

Of course, that doesn't get anything done in the end, so I figured I'd better finish this off before it got even more out of date and I came back to it wondering what on earth I'd been on about in the first place.

As one year rolls inexorably into another I've been thinking, for the most part, at least, about identity, specifically mine: where I am with certain aspects of my identity (which I'm using as a high-falutin' way of saying "what I'm doing with my life") and where I want them to go.

Identity as a writer

When it comes to writing I think I've had a pretty good year, though I've written very little compared to previous years. I'm less frustrated with my writing than I was, perhaps because I've focussed less upon it than in the past. For the first time ever I've published a story, The Girl, Death (albiet on my own website, true) for all and sundry to read. Now that that particularly silly mental obstacle is out of the way I can think more about actually writing things than about whether or not people will like them.

I don't expect to have a huge amount of time to write in the coming year, mainly because there are so many other things that I want to do (on which subjects more shortly) but I do expect that, when I write, I'll be more relaxed about telling the story I want to tell; I certainly won't be worrying every second about how I can never finish the story because everyone will hate it (nobody, so far, has hated the last one).

Identity as a photographer

Roughly this time last year I started my Three hundred and sixty-odd days of 2008 photography project. Like all similarly-named projects the idea was to take (and post) one photo for each day of 2008 (or near enough anyway, given that I started a couple of days late). Whilst I haven't managed to get round to uploading all of the photos to my Flickr stream (partly because I'm lazy, partly because I fell behind in the processing of them) I did manage to capture the majority of, or at least bits of the where-I-was-at-the-time-ness of 2008, on camera. It was an exhausting exercise, and since this year I'd like to do things that are more and varied (quite aside from arranging my wedding) I don't think I'll be attempting anything on nearly as grand a scale in 2009. There will be something photography-project wise this year; I just don't know what it is yet (though I have some ideas).

Separately from the idea of some kind of overarching project, I want to push myself further as a photographer. I blogged a while back about wanting to photograph more people. Whilst my request for subjects didn't yield many responses (probably because it didn't get read by many people for starters) it did yield some, and I intend to take the people who offered their services as models up on their offers some time in the next year.

I've been viewing and loving the work of people like Bert Stephani, LIME, Katie Lee and Dave Hobby for much of the last year, and I think it's about time that I did something with all the inspiration and ideas that they've given me. Even if the work that I produce from that inspiration is derivative in the beginning it will, hopefully at least, eventually lead to a style of my own as time goes by (in much the same way as emulating your writing heroes eventually leads to you finding your own voice). As usual, I'll post the results of my experiments in trying-to-be-good-at-what-I-do to Flickr or somewhere similar. As much as possible I'll make them available under a Creative Commons license, though depending on who's in the images the licenses may vary.

People have asked me whether I want to start moving into the realm of the semi-pro photographer, and I suppose that in some ways I do (for example, I bought myself an insanely expensive Nikon 70-200mm lens as an end-of-year present; I'd like to at least pay for some of its value through using it). Truthfully, though, I'm more interested in becoming a better artist than I am in becoming rich through my photography. Money is nice, but it's a means to an end; having money for the sake of having money is a silly game to play, especially in this day and age. I may consider selling some of my work as prints in the future, but I don't think I'm at that level yet (and besides, I think I'd need a bigger audience for that to really work).

As far as the quality of my photography goes, I know I'm getting better. I'm more comfortable behind the camera and I'm happier with the results than I was in January 2008. I want to continue to grow and learn, though - otherwise what's the point?

Identity as a software developer

Let's face it, being a Launchpad developer is the best job I've ever had. I've been with Canonical for eighteen months now and I'm loving every minute of it. Launchpad is going from strength to strength and (as I've said to just about anyone who's ever asked me) you couldn't ask to work with better bunch of developers.

Launchpad will be open sourced in July, and I'm both happy about it (because after all I love freedom) and a little scared (because a part of me keeps thinking that once we go open source I'll no longer be necessary, though I suspect that's nonsense).

I honestly and genuinely want Launchpad to be the best that it can be and I can only see Open Sourcing it being a great help in continuing that. The Launchpad user community has some phenomenal brains in it; I can only see that having some of them looking at the code will make our work that much easier (even if they don't contribute patches; having someone going "WTF?" at odd code can be a great help, which is why I love code reviews so much).

I'm really looking forward to what we have in store for Launchpad in 2009. I think the users will love it, too.

Identity as a FOSS contributor

This has been growing on my mind for most of the past year. Although I'm working for a company that backs one of the most popular Linux distributions I don't contribute an enormous amount to open source projects, besides filing the occasional bug.

If there's one thing that working with people like Daniel, Jorge and Jono (besides that it's a good idea to practice before you play a gig - or indeed to know the songs you're going to play) is that all OSS projects need help, not just with bug hunting but with documentation, too.

I'm hoping that I'll be able to step up my contributions to the various FOSS projects that I use this year. I don't know that I'll always have enough domain nouse to be able to contribute a patch to fix a bug but at least I can help with triaging and isolating the bugs.

Identity as a human being

I'm getting married in 347 days(!). I can't imagine at the moment just how crazy things are going to get as we go through the year, but I'd like to think that my fiancée and I can deal with it.

When it comes to this time next year and I'm writing the next iteration of this post I want to look back and be able to say that I every hour of 2009 full of minutes.

Of course, only time will tell.