sumit/blogs

So it’s been a week since I finished my NaNoWriMo effort, a self-imposed break during which I wrote essentially nothing except a few hundred words for the day job. I guess I should say that that it was a relief not to have to crank out the words, but it wasn’t. I think I like writing too much.

Anyway, NaNoWriMo: I decided to do it this year because I needed to kickstart a writing project that wasn’t work-related. It was starting to look like I wasn’t going to get any closer to writing a novel than the shambolic SF epic I produced (perhaps excreted would be a better word) in my mid-teens. A writing class, a writing group and various exercise programs didn’t do the trick; for one reason or another, they all fizzled out before I built momentum.

To be honest, I didn’t expect NaNoWriMo to be any different, and it nearly became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I wrote perhaps a fifth of the target wordcount in the first half of the month. But about halfway through the month, shame kicked in. Posting my participation to this blog helped – even if only about two people in the world read it and neither of them probably cared.

The flipside is the total dashing of my secret hopes that the rush of words would flow magically into anything approximating a coherent story. It was quite easy to hit my target of 2500 word per hour of typing (i.e. not including think time). But the words didn’t necessarily make much sense, and the characters didn’t come to life.

So what I’m left with is not really even a first draft, it’s more like a collection of notes. A brain dump of variations on a theme. But that’s not a bad thing. I’d have been satisfied just to have proved that I can actually see a project through to completion. Having anything useful at all at the end of the process is a bonus.

Add to that the fact that I actually like my themes, my beginning and ending, and the chapter in which one of my characters offers up a 3000-word exposition of what the plot actually should have been, and I’m pretty gratified with my NaNoWriMo experience. And now the real test begins: eleven months in which to turn my pile of notes into a novel. Or write another, better one. Wish me luck.

A few days ago, I wrote a post that made mild mockery of a council press release. But then there was all this stuff about Prince Charles and then I read this BBC guide to libel and defamation (via Barbelith).

And although I was pretty sure that libel wasn’t a consideration (although there was a very specific precedent in this case), I started to think about the definition of a “public figure” and when it becomes morally justifiable to poke fun at someone without their knowledge. And I thought that maybe I didn’t want to start down that road with this blog. And in the end I decided it it wasn’t a good idea to put the post up.

I don’t know if that makes me an editor, a censor, a coward or a revisionist, but I tell you what: this weblogging lark is harder than it looks.

When I was a child, my parents would leave me in the library for hours on end while they went shopping, safe in the knowledge that I would hardly notice their absence, wholly preoccupied with the seemingly infinite stock of books. I swore back then that one day I’d produce a book of my own, adding one more volume to the thousands lined up neatly on the shelves.

I discovered the Internet in 1990. At first glance, there seemed little more to it than orange screen text, but it didn’t take me too long to discover that there was a wealth of material accessible via FTP, Usenet and gopher. Then came the World Wide Web, which transformed the online experience – and as I surfed the rapidly growing ocean of pages I vowed that one day I’d make my own contribution.

Well, I’ve since been instrumental in the development of several books and websites, but they’ve all been team efforts. This site, however, is all mine. The book will have to wait – for the moment, anyway. So, without further ado:

Hello, world!