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October-November of last year, I got a graphics tablet for my birthday; a lovely Wacom Bamboo tablet. And since then I’ve been learning to use it, going through several tutorials, then finding my own way. It’s actually got me loving doing drawing and and making me want to draw and create. (Warning image heavy post after the cut!)

Continued reading >

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Last night at storytime I figured that maybe my 7yo daughter Alice would be ready for some of my favourite books as a kid. I suggested we read some Roald Dahl and she agreed. Last time I tried to read some, it didn’t go down well but this time she told me her best friend was reading Matilda.

We read the first chapter and have to say I had forgotten how wonderful Roald Dahl writes. Matilda is about a little girl who happens to be a genius but has horrible parents. The first chapter is about the wonder of books and libraries. After the first chapter, my daughter asked to read more herself and she would have read all night if I hadn’t told her to go to sleep.

And this morning, she was telling me all the terrible tricks that Matilda did on her parents in revenge. I remember the story myself when I read it as a kid and to see the excitement from my daughter as she retells how Matilda put super glue on her father’s hat or how she switched her mother’s hair bleach with her father’s hair spray, made me all happy this morning.

tl;dr Books rock.

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(I tried to avoid doing cross-post, but I think this is too cute to not share and it gives me an excuse to put Ninja legitimately in a post title!)

My seven year old daughter Alice announced she wants to be a ninja when she grows up. She’s already formed a secret ninja club (girls only) in her class. And after homework I was press ganged into making ninja stars from tin-foil and cardboard and my wife made braces from black velvet so she could start her ninja training. She plans to train every day.

Of course she is young, she has much to learn and she had many questions, like, how do ninjas train? What do they actually do? What weapons do ninjas use besides ninja stars (toilet roll nun-chucks are planned)? Hmm she is wise.

(Someone has already kindly pointed to the Ninja-shirt-technique. This will be tomorrow’s Ninja training!)

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First things first, happy new year and welcome to 2012! I hope everyone had a pleasant Christmas.

This is a bit of belated post, really should have done this in December but I haven’t written anything since November after NaNoWriMo ended. If you don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, well it’s a month you’re meant to set aside and attempt to write 50,000 words of a novel. The idea is to flat out write non-stop, get the writing juices going.

I sadly finished at only 30063 words, which averages out at about 1000 words a day and just over half the target. Once NaNoWriMo finished, I took short break… and didn’t write until a month later. I was drained, my motivation to write anything had been sapped. It’s not as bad as it sounds, December is full of stress too, new work project, present buying, organising travel and arrangements for the holidays, school shows to attend and so on. So lots of things to drain any extra energy I had. But now the busy-ness of the holidays is over and I can start to get back into the swing of things.

Still I can’t deny that NaNoWriMo drained me a lot. Before that I was doing a solid 1000 words a day with my wordcount. I wasn’t getting 7000 words a week out though because I took a few nights off to do various other things. It was a much more healthy approach. So when I was writing, I was enjoying the process and the wordcount target kept me going. However with NaNoWriMo that got turned up to 11. I had to hit a target of 2000 words a day at least to hit the 50,000 words, and I had to write every day. If I missed a day, I had to catch up the next day. If the story wasn’t working, I couldn’t give up the wordcount for a day to go back over it and see what I needed to do. I had to keep going.

I haven’t looked at what I wrote. It wasn’t until the 20,000 mark when I realised the story wasn’t going to work. But I kept going, pushing forward. I had a lot of good ideas but I mowed through them to try and hit that target. The lack of flexibility created stress and I discovered I really do only have a finite amount of creative “bandwidth†for these things. Pushing over the limit didn’t work for me. Everyone has their own limits. I do a lot with the kids in the evening for example and so my writing is done after the kids are in bed.

It’s not all bad, it was great to attempt to write a novel. Taught me a lot about long-form writing. I’ve written so much flash fiction and short stories over the years that I hadn’t realised that novel writing is a different sort of craft. So there is no regrets. Even during December where I wrote nothing, I did instead reach for my pen and my new Wacom tablet and do some drawings and images. (I even setup a DeviantArt profile if you are that way inclined). It also gave me some space, a break from my existing projects. And now I’m rearing to go, getting back into the swing of things.

Here’s to 2012!

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Now I know what it’s like to not be a writer (even a perpetual amateur like me).

It’s quite liberating. No agonising over not writing, no overthinking on words and scenes and meanings. Freedom to choose what I spend my time doing. Is this what it’s like all the time for people who don’t write?

I got two new shinies in the last three weeks, a Nintendo 3DS and a shiny new Android phone. I knew I’d loose a few days of #wordcount to the new toys. Heck it was my birthday, right?

But that niggling feeling that you should be writing… it’s gone right now. The “niggling feeling” can be the worst source of procrastination with writing (sometimes called Writers-block). You know you should write, but you don’t have the energy/will/whatever to start something right then¹. Which only feeds that niggling feeling, which in turn increases the tension between starting something and your energy and can be a vicious circle. I thought I broke it with my wordcount² which I was successfully hitting nearly everyday.

It’s even snaked it’s way into my social media habits, making me more of a consumer than contributor. I’m just more than a little disinclined to engage or post on the various (okay two) services I frequent and even less likely to comment. I even let one or two days go by without checking it and don’t make any attempt to catch up.

I find this mildly curious, why my desire to write is tided into my desire to share online?

And my ennui does not appear to be abating. In fact I see it getting worse. I just got Street Fighter 4 for my new 3DS and a mixture of solid casual gameplay and a strong dose of nostalgia, has absorbed me. But Gaelcon ascends on the horizon (despite the flooding) this weekend and after that is the potential of NanoWriMo next month (which I seem to have avoided making any decision on). So maybe it’ll pan out.

Maybe I should consider this a holiday away from writing.

¹ It’s not just in writing, in my secret identity as a programmer, we jokingly call this tension in our work flow “context-switching”, after the computer operation (done by the CPU) of switching between tasks and loading in and out the associated context of states and threads and so on. When you’re working an embedded device, you want to reduce these sort of operations as it can be an expensive task in terms of load. It seems it can also be an “expensive task” for us humans too and if you’re already tired, it can suck all motivation out of your next task.

² This blog post only counts for ~500 or so words of my #wordcount for the day. But it’s something. It’s all words.

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