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Slightly behind the times, I thought I should spread the word of the News from Poughkeepsie, a new project from the Mighty Mur Lafferty.

To quote the Murster herself:

I’m going to blog an idea a day for 1 year. It will usually be in the form of a blog post, but it may be in the form of an audio or video podcast, delivered to you if you’re subscribed to the Murverse feed.

You can find said feed through the Murverse site. Go, read, enjoy, make use of (the ideas are under a Creative Commons attribution license). They've already got my idea cogs turning. Now all I need to do is find the time to put them to use (and also to stop my developer mind from using the brainjuice first; that bit's a real battle).

Warren Ellis worries about the dogs taking over. Me being a country boy, I worry about the cows. From the BBC (link):

A Sussex policeman has been discharged from hospital after an attack by about 50 cows left him with four broken ribs and a punctured lung.

I'll be eyeing the cows outside the back window with suspicion from here-on in.

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.

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.

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.