Quick tumbly musings
I had a long and involved conversation with my friend Michelle last night about the nature of consciousness, the existence of free will and the need for a story to be happy (or at least not entirely bleak) before it gets bleak. I'll expand on these later (if I remember) but I'm now heading off [...]
The news from Poughkeepsie
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 [...]
Be afraid
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 [...]
No mojo, no longer
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 [...]
Servermachine bilong Graham gone buggerup
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? [...]
Other stuff, not TV so much
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 [...]
This is why we keep notes
I’ve just discovered the beginning of a story in the notebook in which I started a different story last night, which had hitherto been somewhat neglected in the notebook-usage stakes. I haven’t got the first sodding clue as to what it’s about. It’s funny though. This is why we keep notes about things, yes? Remember [...]
Someone’s got to do it
A depressing thought struck me as I was wandering through the Science Fiction and fantasy section of Borders in Preston – as an aside here I have to say that Borders doesn’t feel like a proper book shop, but it’s the biggest not-a-proper-bookshop nearby and, as such, is probably my best chance of finding something [...]
Re-learning the basics
It’s funny, but even though I’ve been programming professionally on a day-by-day basis for the past two and a bit years, I’ve only just rediscovered one of the things that I always found difficult about programming when I was doing it as a student (and therefore from home), which was this: I procrastinate. A lot. [...]
Odds and Ends
It’s a little odd, being someone who occupies only a very, very small corner of the internets, to find that people that I haven’t had to go out and tell about this blog have actually taken the trouble to leave comments on it. One of them is my very good friend of about eight hundred [...]
Voices
Enjoying the hiatus from writing, but itching to get back to it. Tonight I’ll be getting started on – or rather getting to the middle on – a short story that I’ve been scribbling away at during downtime (usually when waiting to pick Sarah up or at spare moments during the day) for the last [...]
Done
98,203 / 98,203 (100.0%) 98,203 words.Done. More-or-less, anyway. Okay, let’s be honest here. There are bits that I need to fill in, mostly marked in caps, dotted all around the manuscript. Unless I’m very much wrong, they’ll add up to at least another 5,000 words, but the story’s there, even if it’s just in brief [...]
The Todo List
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 [...]
I think you’ll find that reality’s on the blink again
BBC New Magazine: Baby, I’m desperate Wannabes queued up to conceive a baby with a stranger live on air for a £100,000 prize… It started as a challenge – to come up with the ultimate tasteless reality TV show and test the boundaries of the format. But in just eight weeks, "Let’s Make a Baby" [...]
We will sue you for breach of contract
The Times: Woman awarded compensation after the hitman that she paid for failed to kill her Reeves banked the money and told Mrs Ryder that she would be killed in a drive-by shooting on June 11, 2003. She wasn’t; Reeves telephoned her to cancel the arrangement, saying that he had had to kill the hitman [...]
It’s all about the cheese, man
Thanks to Neil Gaiman, today’s weird news story comes to us from Memphis, TN, in which a woman hired a hitman (who turned out to be a copper) to kill four men for what turned out to be… A block of cheese. Fully story here. “Four men were going to lose their lives over some [...]
Santa might be a bit slow bringing the presents this year, kids…
Danish air force kills Rudolf “We got a letter from Santa complaining about his reindeer’s death and looked into it seriously,” air force spokesman Captain Morten Jensen told Associated Press. Flight data showed the jets had been in the area at the time, and a vet concluded that their deafening roar had caused Rudolph to [...]
