venta

Bookkeeping for New Year's Resolutions, February edition.

My sleeping resolution achieved something somewhere been decent success and catastrophic failure. Y'see, I've not been doing a bad job of getting to sleep reasonably early. Sadly, the expected benefits have not done their bit and shown up... I've spent most of February feeling tired, lethargic, out of sorts and out of clock[*].

I have a current, tentative explanation for this: I do seem to find that the whole "exercise gives you more energy" thing is true. And a series of increasingly implausible-sounding injuries means that my usual round of walking, running, cycling and dancing has been right out for the last six weeks. Other than the occasional unavoidable rapper practice (with painkillers) the most exciting thing I've done is hobbled to the station of a morning.

Anyway, I have not been bounding out of bed with glee, I have not been making useful use of all the spare time that would make available, and I have not yet taken over the world.

Last month I amended my resolution to submit a written piece somewhere to say that it ought to be something written this year. In February, I resolved to write something for a sci-fi competition which required entries to (a) explore a Eutopian/Dystopian theme, (b) involve only plausible science and (c) involve at least one non-human character.

At which point I more or less ran into a wall, and spent about three weeks trying to come up with an idea. Oh, that's a nice idea for a non-human character... but no story to put it in. There's a great plan for a Eutopia... but it relies on a low-tech environment to work, so not great sci-fi. And so on. And so on.

Of course, what I probably should have done is given up and written something else instead. Instead I carried on hitting my brain with a stick until it came up with an idea, started writing it[**]... and realised that I didn't really know where it was going. Or why. I had a plausibly scientific Eutopia with several non-humans, but a fundamental and crashing lack of actual plot. Bah.

Anyway. I gave an existing story a little bit of a polish and sent it out into the world to seek its fortune (with thank to

hirez for recommending http://www.ralan.com as a place to find destinations). I started to do the same for another, longer story, but discovered rather disappoingintly that it wasn't really as good as I thought it was.

So... more work required. Must write more. I am becoming more willing to hack stuff about brutally when editing, though, which is probably a good thing.

Reading books is, of course, barely a resolution - more of a "thing to do in 2013". However, I'll take success where I can find it. I trundled through three books from my 2013 reading list this month, which is plenty fast enough to get through 25 in a year. Reviews will be along shortly.

[*] If you don't know the phrase "out of clock", then you have not read A Face Like Glass and you should get on the case right away.
[**] On the basis that if you write a thing, and it's rubbish, you can make it better. If you haven't written it, you can't do anything with it.