Write...if you can't write, read...if you can't read...blame something

It’s been a week of lots of reading, lots of ideas but not as much productive writing as I would have liked. I’m trying to be a good parent so I won’t blame the kids even if it was all their fault for taking up my valuable time.

Speaking of the rugrats one of the ideas that seems to be taking up residence in my brain currently is a reworking of my baby diaries project. It should be simple enough – just take the bare bones of what is there and choose all the interesting parts…bring it up to date with the three years that have taken place since the timeframe of the diary and fix all the horrible writing. So write a book from scratch in other words.

Activity Central

It's been a bumper week for writing. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say it's been a bumper week for things I've previously written appearing on web pages.

No sooner did Crouching Feline, Hidden Lobster appear on Shortbread than The Curse appeared. Yes kids, it's time to see if the mute really can whistle...

As if that wasn't enough, the first issue of Traffic is now available for download on iTunes and contains an article all about me written by...um...me. Next stop world domination or something.

In fact...it's been so busy The Afrowelshman decided to come out of hibernation today and see what all the fuss is about.

Hope you find something in there to enjoy - I'm off to do some new stuff.

Three scratches shy of a decade

In the midst of the madness that usually surrounds our normal day it dawned on me that last week marked seven years of living in South Africa. The day passed with barely an itch which suggests that I must be in a fairly good head space right now. Every good point needs a counterpoint however and this was provided in the form of Crouching Feline, Hidden Lobster.

Angry Bird

The sun has been shining in Cape Town for the last few days. This is a good thing and, given the run of four months with above long term average rainfall, a rare sight since the heady days of May.

While I’m busy mentioning good things, another good thing is the fact that a blog post gives no sense of time and does not require me to list everything that happens from one paragraph to the next. If this was a real time account you’d have just had to witness me jousting with the ghost of Elmore Leonard for breaking his first rule of writing – Never open a book with the weather. I managed to fend him off by showing him a selection of my work where he agreed that I had stuck to his overriding principle by not having anything that sounds like writing anywhere in sight.

Can a mute person whistle?

Over recent weeks I have found myself asking a lot of strange things of Google. The question used as the title of this post is the latest in a long line of random queries I have submitted in the quest to keep my stories relatively accurate. For Gastro The Great I spent a good chunk of time finding out about unfounded food scares and the potential for genetically modifying chickens. A Matter Of Time had me checking out how many times a person breathes on average during his or her life as well as the number of hours a person spends on a train. Pretty much everything else in the story I extrapolated (in a highly mathematical and scientific fashion of course) from those two facts.

Time is irrelevant

I seem to spend a lot of time thinking about time. More accurately, I spend a lot of time bemoaning the fact that there’s just not enough time. Perhaps this is something that happens once you’ve turned forty. Life is supposed to begin now but there’s just not enough time for it to happen. I can take solace at least in the fact that scientists have concluded that fifty three is now officially the start of middle age so I’ve got a way to go yet.

Internet Explorer followers glitch

For some reason my lovely little followers section on the right hand panel of the blog doesn't render correctly in internet explorer unless you run in compatibility mode.

So if you want to follow me rather than get the email updates and you are hitting this problem then please navigate to tools > compatibility view. This will add my site to the compatibility mode list and hey presto the widget appears.

Drabble

I learned a new word this week - drabble.

A drabble is (and I wikiquote) an extremely short work of fiction of exactly one hundred words in length not necessarily including the title. The purpose of the drabble is brevity, testing the author's ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in an extremely confined space.
 

Garagiste

I was recently asked to contribute a piece for Traffic entitled Garagiste. The idea behind it is to show lots of people who know lots of things about cars (that's not me) that other people who know nothing about cars (that's me) get up to all kinds of cool stuff in their respective garage - homebrewing in my case.

It's always good to have a certain synergy between one's hobbies and I'm starting to find the correct balance. I make beer which is a fine accompaniment to writing. My time spent writing is balanced by going running, and what's better after a run than a beer? (anyone who answered with smoothie or some kind of energy drink is not a real runner)

New site up and running

So I have officially gone from being a human to being a domain.

For anyone checking this out let me apologise in advance for all the looming bugs and glitches while I sort out how I want this thing to look.

It's likely that I will mess up the DNS settings again and the page will disappear.