I'm writing this on my old Palm Vx, which I dug up the last time I went home. In nearly pristine condition, it's a relic from my web designer days, when I needed to keep track of an awful lot of meetings and was given this by my boss to do so. As soon as I left that job, I found I didn't really need it, so it was put away for half a decade to emerge only now.



It's funny how stylish it still looks - actually, it looks nicer than Kevin's Tungsten T5, and if you can't see the screen, it could pass for something new. I used to be quite good at the Graffiti alphabet used to input text, and am quickly getting my chops back. Certainly it's quicker than trying to type on the Nokia E61's tiny keyboard. Battery life is fab, and the flash memory means no faffing around with stupidly long menu trees to save stuff.



The problem is that it doesn't seem possible to sync it any more. I have a serial to USB adaptor, and the Palm Desktop in both Mac and PC flavours, but the Mac refuses to recognise that there is anything there to sync with, whilst the PC sees the device but can't figure out how to talk to it. I've spent a fair amount of time fiddling, but nothing seems to help. Palm Vx and computer just don't like each other any more. Perhaps the laptops feel the ol' Palm is just too passé.

But hoorah! All is not lost. It turns out that I can beam documents from the Vx to my E61 using infrared, then I can Bluetooth them from the E61 to my Macbook. In theory, this works the other way round too, as the E61 can beam files to the Palm but in practice the Palm can't recognise the file contents, so displays them as truncated gobbledegook.

What this means is that I can't add any new Palm apps to the Vx, so I can't add AvantGo (which it used to have), so I can't cram it full of stuff to read. It is, effectively, a write-only device. There is not much else it can do that's of any use. Yes, the other apps all work, but I don't do much calculating on a daily basis, and an address book on an un-networked device is a bit useless. So really all I can do is write... No disturbances. No multitasking. No interruption. (Although also, no spell checker either.)

I've started to carry it with me wherever I go, and scribbling down scraps of blog posts whilst on the tube or, as today, on the plane. (Let's just say that going to Berlin and back in one day is not necessarily a habit I would encourage anyone to get into.) The amount of stuff I've got going on never seems to diminish, and time for blogging seems to be getting harder and harder to come by. But maybe by using the little lost moments on the tube I can get more written.

The unexpected benefit of resurrecting this old thing is the retro geek joy it engenders. At Future of Web Apps, everyone I showed it too cooed as if it were something new and exciting, like an iPod Touch. I think people have fond memories of Palms from this era - they were certainly nicer than many of their contemporary competitors - but these days Palm devices feel old and unloved. If only Palm would do a serious update of both their OS and their desktop. Syncing and conduits and stuff are just all so boring - we want it to just work, not to be a right royal pain the backside. (Although frankly, all syncing is a right royal pain in the backside, if you ask me.)

Anyway, I am not going to promise anything, but it is possible that I will get more blogging done now.

Maybe.

I have successfully managed to blog at least once, sometimes more than once, a day for the last seven days, as per my promise to myself. In fact, this post complete the septet. It has been fun - it's reminded me of why I started this blogging lark in the first place. Indeed, I'd say that I've enjoyed it so much that I vow now to blog every day for the next month. How's that for ambition?

What I'm less chuffed about... positive dischuffed about, as it happens... is the fact that this morning's plan to go to the gym was entirely scuppered by my awakening at some point in the middle of the night with awful stomach and back pain. I have no idea what it was, but although it was gone by morning, I lost a couple of hours sleep and just couldn't haul myself out of bed in time. Kevin had a bad night too, so we decided to skip the gym.

Turned out that was a good thing, because Kev's working on a paper for Xtech at the moment, and I'd spent a couple of hours yesterday editing it for him in Google Docs. Sadly, Google Docs has a bit of a crappy UI, and when he checked my revision it only showed him the last sentence I had typed so he thought I hadn't made many changes. When he gave me a print out of his 'new' version, I found that all my edits were missing, so I had to sit with the printout and do it the old fashioned way - with a red pen - before he left for work.

That made me late for coffee with Matt Biddulph, a situation exacerbated by my mobile phone deciding to no longer sync with my Mac. Apple have, at last, enabled native support for the Nokia E61, and have thus automatically disabled the eSeries plugin that used to make iSync work. What they didn't figure in to this was how people who were using the plugin would then sync with their Mac, given that iSync now wants to duplicate my entire calendar and address book because it doesn't recognise that the calendar on my phone is still the same as the one on my Mac. Feh. Stupid developers.

Then I spilt toothpaste down my front.

And at some point during the day I spilt something brown and unidentified onto my microfleece.

But other than that, it's been a great day. I have been working on a white paper I'm writing about citizen journalism and curation which is at that final spit and polish stage. I'm hoping to have it done by Monday, which just happens to also be my deadline.

I've spent a lot of time writing this week: blog posts, this white paper, other bits and pieces that may see the light of day sometime next spring. I have even had an idea for something else that I want to write very soon, even if I don't get round to starting it tonight. All this writing has felt good. True, I've pretty much ignored email and I'm sure there are people out there who think that I'm the most difficult person to get a hold of these days, but by George (any George you like) I've enjoyed it.

I need to write more. It makes me happy.

Although Wendy didn't tag me, I'm going to do this book meme anyway, because I think it's fun.

Grab the book closest to you.
Open to page 123, go down to the fifth sentence
Post the text of next 3 sentences on your blog
Name of the book and the author
Tag three people

Ok...
digon - enough
digonedd (m) - abundance, plenty
dwbl (m) - double

6000 Welsh Words, by Ceri Jones. Ok, so no one said that it had to be a work of fiction!

I tag Steve, Kate, and Kevin (although I'm not sure this will fit in on Strange Attractor, Kev, so you might just have to get yourself that personal blog you mentioned earlier...).

If you were to find yourself in a lift with blogger who had, say, been writing for the last... oh, four and a half years, and that blogger said that, despite an underlying feeling that it was in some way cheating, she was considering pulling together some of her best posts and tidying them up and seeing maybe if there was some sort of, oh, I dunno, book there... What would you say?

I have to admit when the first blooks (or was it blogooks? or bloks? I dunno...) came out, I found myself looking down my nose at them a little. I means, Belle de Jour. Please. The standard of Ms de Jour's writing was only slightly above that of teenage boy from Swindon who'd read too much Jilly Cooper, seen too many bad porn films, and hadn't yet come to terms with his obsessive shopping gene.

But there are plenty of fantastic bloggers, there really is a potential I think for bloggers to write books which can stand alone as books without the context of the blog from which they were derived. Tom has proven that in spades.

I'm also getting over my feelings that somehow it's cheating to turn a blog into a book. Just because the effort's been spread out over four years doesn't mean you haven't put any thought into what you're writing. Indeed, some of my posts have been more like essays than blog entries, and I've thought them out in a lot of detail.

And finally, the whole thing about vanity publishing... well, I certainly wouldn't call The Friday Project, who published Tom, vanity publishers.

Of course, the difference between me and Tom is that Tom's blog is pretty focused. I remember a couple of years back being advised by Hugh MacLeod that if I wanted to be successful I had to focus my blog on one particular thing. Of course, that's a bit like asking a butterfly to settle down. My brain doesn't really work like that - I flit from thing to thing and the only unifying theme is the fact that it's me that's flitting. I don't really know if that's enough.

But let's say our anonymous blogger in a lift decides to do this. Which posts would you like her to pick?

Due to technical difficulties, such as the shops being shut on Monday morning when T'Other and I had a scrap of time to go shopping for my birthday present, I didn't get my Moleskine until yesterday, but to make up for the delay, T'Other bought me a nice (and reasonably priced) Lamy pen. We can't afford the really expensive Lamy pens just yet, but this one writes nicely and will do me for now. I'll buy a posh one with the advance from this novel...

Har har har.

Anyway, I've just written the opening chapter. It'll be a very short chapter, I suspect, but it's written. Shite, but written. Nearly illegible in places, but written. I don't know how many words it is, because I can't be arsed to count, but maybe that's a good thing. The word count is an ongoing obsession whenever I am writing, and I'm really not convinced that that's healthy. I should be obsessing about telling the story I want to tell, not about how many words it's taking me to tell it.

For better or for worse, I am basing this novel on the script I wrote a couple of years back, and my aim is to rewrite a page of script per day. I'm finding that I am erring towards writing in the present tense, and I'm really not sure if that's going to work or not, long term, but it's hard to read something in the present and then write the same thing in the past. The couple of pages in my notebook seem to swing between tenses, which makes for uncomfortable reading (well, no more so than my hammy, crappy style), but then, this is a first draft: eaoe.

I haven't written anything long-hand like this for years. I think the last time I did it was in 97-ish, when I was working on a really crappy vampire novel. I would write on the tube, in mirror-writing because I didn't want anyone reading over my shoulder. Of course, I can't easily read my own mirror-writing now, so in order to read it I'd have to scan and flip each page. I am pretty damn sure it wouldn't be worth it, though.

Anyway, if I can manage to rewrite a page of script per day, then I'll be done in 109 days, so some time in August.

I repeat: Har har har.

So, if you're a long-time reader of this blog, you'll already know about my writerly leanings. You'll have seen me talk about my scriptwriting; you'll have seen me writing about learning languages (still not finished); you'll have heard about my acquiring a literary agent (whom I still have, by the way, and who is still helping me out with one thing and another). You'll also have heard me gush about Neil Gaiman and what a spiffingly lovely/talented/generous/friendly guy he is.

Forgive my name-dropping, but I've been thinking a lot about Neil lately. Actually, I've had three dreams about him in the last week. The first two dreams were about me staying in a big house that was a bit like something out of MirrorMask which then turned out to be Neil's house. The third dream was me having a coffee with Neil and telling him that I'd had these dreams about staying in his house. That one was really confusing to wake up from, I can tell you.

Anyway... a few splinters have stuck in my mind, and they have reached a point of irritation so great that I have to do something about them. Due to the timely reduction in my consulting workload, I now have both the will and the time to do what needs to be done.

The first splinter was unknowingly embedded by Neil. When I met him to talk about the Open Rights Group (of which he is kindly Patron, and which I would be grateful if you could support so that we can afford to hire talent to help expand the group, thus providing me with more time to write this blog), I ended up going to dinner with Neil and some of his friends. I did one of those things I do sometimes where I mindlessly say something really inane, and then have to rely on everyone around me to either ignore it or be kind. The inane thing I said was that I 'really ought to do something about this whole book reading thing'. The look Neil gave me in response to that I interpreted to mean 'Well, why don't you then?'. Quite right too. Why don't I?

Next splinter. People all around me keep writing books. Bastards. Cory, obviously, all the sodding time. Jeeze... ever been in a room with Cory typing at full speed? It's frightening. Tom. Ben. Half my geek friends have books on the shelf at Waterstones. Where on earth to they find the time? I know how busy Cory and Ben are. And I know Tom doesn't exactly sit on his arse all day. So, being busy is not an excuse.

Final splinter. I met up with Ben Whyte from the British Library a few weeks ago, and before we got down to the nitty gritty of copyright and licensing, he showed me the gallery they have there. You'd never think to go to the British Library, but my god, they have an astonishing collection of manuscripts. The Lindisfarne Gospels, Leonardo da Vinci's notebook, Handel's Messiah... they even have the Magna Carta. Wowser.

But the thing that really struck me was the fact that they have Lewis Carroll's original hand-written Alice's Adventures Under Ground. Eventually, they may carry Neil's original notebooks for Anansi Boys, who knows?

The thing is, it's a physical thing. My first instinct when writing anything is to crack open the iBook and start there, but that instinct is causing me to pause. Is that the right way to go about this?

I used to be on a mailing list of Cory's, where he was writing a novel and sending out to a small group of people about 250 words a day. I don't know what happened to that - he stopped for a while, and I'm not even sure if I'm still on the list, but I thought it was an interesting way to try and keep motivation going. It was exciting for me as a reader, but fascinating for me as a writer to see how things would develop and whether it would work as a tactic for getting oneself to keep writing.

As a blogger, however, I was thinking that maybe I should start a new blog, and publish my 250 words a day on that. Again, having an audience would put a comfortable pressure on me to write regularly. But then again... I have an audience here and we can't exactly say that I've felt any pressure to write here regularly, can we? Besides, I'm not sure I actually feel happy publishing my first drafts. Writing a book is not writing a blog, even if some publishers at the moment are happy to hunt through blogs for stuff that might make a decent book, the two are not interchangeable. Just ask Tom.

Then there's that saying, "If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got."

If I sit and write on my iBook, maybe, just maybe, it'll go the way of all previous books of mine. It will languish on my hard drive and never actually go anywhere.

So... add up all the pieces. Extract the splinters and try to figure out why they have been bugging me. That's what writing this post is for. If I recognise what's been stopping me, and what motivates me, maybe I can clear whatever mental block has been in the way and stopping me doing what I frequently claim to want to do but never actually seem to get on with doing.

Final piece of the puzzle. It's my birthday on Saturday. I'll be 35. Shit. How did that happen? I mean... where did the years go? I don't feel 35. And I feel a bit like I haven't really fulfilled my potential, and that the only person to blame for that is me.

Walking round Brugge at Christmas, I announced to T'Other that I would damn well write a book this year, or else. Christmas/New Year is a really bad time to make resolutions, but birthdays are much better for it. So I have requested as my present from my beloved a nice Moleskine notebook. In it, I shall carefully write my novel. I shall remove my thumb from my arse, and I shall get on with it. And the next time I see Neil, I shall be hoping to say 'My new novel will be out soon...'

So, the chapter I'm writing for the Uses of Blogs book is at the red pen stage. First draft finished this evening, and I've started scrawling all over it in, crossing bits, out, adding bits in, wondering what meds I must have been taking when I wrote that particular sentence. It needs a major rewrite before it's even close to being ready. Still, I have about 12 days before the deadline, so I'm not too worried at this point.

I should be doing ORG stuff now, though, but too tired. Instead, I'm sitting here listening to the omnipresent rumble of distant jets coming into Heathrow. They sound like the far away thunder of waves breaking on rocks. They have just the right sort of tone and frequency... ruuuuuUUUUUMMMMBBlllllleeeeeee ... ... ... ruuuuuuUUUMMMMMBBBBllllllleeeeeeee ... ... ...

If it weren't for the hum of the fridge, I could close my eyes and be there on the beach in Hawaii, hobbit at my feet, monster in jungle, skin cancer on the way. Wouldn't it be bliss to be lost for a while?

And before the deadline too. Yay!

Also, publisher now preparing contract. Yay! Yay again! (Note: Not out of the woods yet, mind you. It ain't over til the fat lady bogsnorkels.)

Got half my chapter written today. 1800 words. Could have been more - I'd been hoping to finish the first draft in one fell swoop - but I was feeling rather ropey this afternoon and found it hard to focus. With any luck, I'll polish off this draft tomorrow and then can let it sit for a few days.

Also have come up with a proposal for Etech 2006, officially The Conference I Most Want To Speak At. Very pleased with it, which probably means it's shite.

Now have just a half dozen more things to do before I can collapse gratefully into bed.

... does it take to write a book?

Hmm.

How long is a piece of string?
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
How many dustbunnies can live underneath a sofa?

How many words can I write a day? Except, I won't write 1000 words a day, or even 500 words a day. Some days I'll write none, and other days I'll go berserk and write 3000 or more. How many screenshots can I use? Can I just write 'the' 125,000 times?

Am I nuts for taking this on, at this time, when I already have ORG happening, which seems to expand to fill my brain and all available time as soon as I wake in the morning, not to mention a Clients Who Pay Real Money? But then, if my aim is to become a real proper author I'm going to have to, y'know, actually write a book at some point. Otherwise I'm just someone with auctorial aspirations.

I think I need to consult with the angels and the dustbunnies. Maybe they have a better idea, because I'm not sure that 'Dear publisher, I think it's going to take me $random_guess months to write this book' is going to work so well.

I have a publisher interested in my book (fingers crossed), and a possible new client (thumbs held*), and this digital rights organisation is slowly taking shape, and I have a book chapter to finish (note the word 'finish', which accurately implies that I've started it, which I have), and BlogOn to organise, and my move to London to sort out, and BarCampUK to kick into shape, and and and...

Don't be surprised or offended or worried if I a) don't blog or b) don't return emails or c) don't respond on IM or d) am generally incommunicado. It just means I'm locked away in a darkened room with my chocolate truffles, Żubrówka and iBook.

* That's what they do in Austria instead of crossing their fingers.

Neil Gaiman's coming to the UK. There will be signings. Which means there may well be queueings. And nerves. Maybe vomiting. Hopefully not. I nearly threw up on Martin Carr's feet once, but that was an unfortunate combination of nerves and food poisoning. At least, that's the story I've maintained for the last decade and I'm not changing it now.

You know, I'd much rather meet Neil in some sort of official capacity, as an equal not as a fan. It would be so much easier on my stomach, not to mention Neil's shoes. This is something I will have to carefully engineer, if not this time round then next. Hmm. Neil, you're not interested in being a patron of our new digital rights organisation at all, are you? You wouldn't have to do anything, just say what a terrifically good idea it all is and let me shake your hand and call you Neil as if I know you and then blush a furious shade of red whilst stammering that we were terrifically, terrifically pleased to have your support. Really very terrifically.

You know, (that's you, dear reader, not necessarily you, dear Neil, although maybe it is you if you happen to swing past on your way through to places more fascinating), I really should write one of these damn books I've been thinking about writing. I am in weekly discussions with my agent now, the truly terrific Neil Salkind from Studio B, about stuff, and I'm feeling particularly enthused about the whole concept of writing having just agreed to write a chapter for Uses of Blogs, ed. Axel Bruns and Joanne Jacobs.

It's been a while since I've felt the creeping need to write something big, but it's crawling through my veins as I type. And believe me, a 3500 word braindump on digital rights is merely a sticking plaster on the wound of auctorial ambition. No, I must begin a book, forthwith and henceforth.

After I've had some sleep.

It's always amusing to see which words the Oxford Dictionary of English has chosen to include in its tome each year. This year, though, it's even cooler than usual, because not only have they decided that the word 'podcast' is widely used enough to warrant inclusion, but I also know the person who coined it.

I can't imagine that. Coining a word that ends up in the ODE. Without wanting to sound too fangirlish, that is really fucking cool. Because of Ben, the word 'podcast' exists, and now it's in the dictionary. Wow.

UPDATE: Thanks to Chris W for pointing out that it's the confusingly titled Oxford Dictionary of English, not the Oxford English Dictionary. I think I'm going to start a competing title, the English Dictionary of Oxford. Or maybe the Dictionary of Oxford English. There's definitely a need.

Just watched last night's Dr Who and I have to agree with Tom that not only is Dr Who is a bit of a tart, but he's also a bit free and easy with gender/species/group sex distinctions. Good for him, I say. Bit jealous really. I never get to dance, let alone set up an interesting threesome with aliens.

Last night I had a dream. Yes, another one. I was on a boat, with Christopher Ecclestone. We were on a river, which was all well and good, but it ran along the edge of a cliff... which was at least a mile high. The water slopped over the edge in a 'your boat would go straight over' manner which scared the crap out of me. But it was ok, because Christopher Ecclestone was there to keep me safe and sound.

But anyway, moving on. I was talking to my mate Ewan about this, and more now than ever I think his take is right. Dr Who is is the last survivor of the Time Wars. The Daleks are all dead. The Time Lords are all dead. Dr Who suffers horrendous survivor guilt and that colours everything he does.

This episode, more than any other, exemplifies survivor guilt. "Everybody lives, Rose. Just this once, everybody lives," says the Doctor as the victims of the poorly adapted nanogenes are finally cured of their ills. The joy in his face is unparalleled by anything else we have seen in this series - he is for the first time truly delighted that he has been able to act as saviour, in however an indirect way.

Consider Father's Day, the episode in which Rose goes back in time to try to save her father's life. The Doctor knows exactly what she has done, he knows the disaster she has caused, and he knows what needs to be done to put it all right, but he can't bring himself to engineer Rose's father's death. He wants him to live, because he feels he can't be responsible for even one more life lost. He's willing to sacrifice the unknown masses in order to safe the known individual - a logic that previous Doctors would never have followed.

For ages with the new series of Dr Who I was really puzzled by the way that the Doctor seemed so passive - very much unlike past Doctors. In the episode The Long Game, with the astonishingly sexy Simon Pegg as The Editor, (why did no one tell me Simon was narrating the Dr Who Confidential series on BBC3? I would have watched them, dammit!), both the Doctor and Rose are helpless and at the mercy of the Editor and his Boss, and they rely upon a secondary character to free them.

This goes totally contrary to our expectations of the Doctor as the Mr Know It All who can fix anything. In fact, I can't think of a single episode in this series where Dr Who has actually taken charge and been directly responsible for the rescue of anyone. Dammit, even the Dalek he tries to rescue, (before he realises it's a Dalek) ends up committing suicide because Rose's DNA has infected it. Damn you, Russell T Davies. Damn your ability to make me cry over a Dalek!

But as soon as you look at this helplessness in terms of survivor guilt, it all makes sense. The Doctor is haunted by memories of the Time Wars. He can't understand why he is still live when everyone else is dead. He has no one left. Nothing left. Just him and his Tardis. Is he a traitor for not dying with the rest? Should he have done thing differently? Sacrificed his life? To what end? Time Lords were always survivors and to die a meaningless death would never have been acceptable.

So instead he is left alone, trying to make sense of what happened, and trying not to repeat what he sees as tragic mistakes. Just how responsible was the Doctor for the death of all those Time Lords, all those Daleks? We heard him crying "It's not my fault!" to the last remaining Dalek. Is that truth, or guilt? Was it his fault? How will Rose react when the truth comes out?

The Doctor is obviously in love with Rose, it's clear as day, and has been for episodes. Will he lose her when all this comes to a head*? It surely must - all the episodes are building up to a climax in which we find out what really happened in the Doctor's past. What were the Time Wars? What happened to the Daleks? The Time Lords? And where was The Master in all this? What part did he have to play? Davros? Is he still kicking about? (Or should that be 'levitating about'?)

I wasn't a Dr Who fan until this series. The old stuff I could take or leave and really not care about, but this series has been fantastic. Russell T Davies has put together a through line that has totally hooked me. He's done something truly different with the Doctor - he's made him human, fallible, vulnerable. For once, the Doctor is not there to save us poor apes, but is instead saved by us. We are going on his personal journey, instead of a journey through space and time that he happens to be taking us on.

As a scriptwriter, I find all this fascinating, and I have to admit to a bit of jealousy. What I wouldn't give to have the opportunity to take a character like the Doctor and turn him on his head, do something really cool and interesting with him. Dr Who is, without doubt, up there with Battlestar Galactica as my all-time favourite scifi.

Anyway, it's 1.20am now - how the hell did that happen? - and whilst I could easily wax lyrical for another hour or so, I shan't. Time for bed. Christopher, are you coming?

* OK, I know Ecclestone leaves at the end of this series, which means a regeneration, which means the relationship is doomed. I was just trying not to think about it, ok?

IMSDb - the Internet Movie Script Database. Don't know if I just missed this in my past searches for scripts, or if it's new. Either way, it's got Constantine so I'm happy.