Oh, and as for scrivener

It's rather nice, more or less designed with me in mind. Or at least, it does what I want it to, which might not be what the designer had in mind in the first place.

But then, at the last possible minute...

...the author threw out the plans he had for NaNoWriMo next month, and decided to go with something completely different!
Again!

Finally got round to finding a decent picture of the Dales to serve as a header for this blog. Enjoy.

A reminder on how to survive the working day

However many bizarre, otherworldly rules your workplace may come up with; however many asinine customers you may have to handle that day... remember the following.

Your job is not who you are. Your job cannot define who you are, unless you allow it to. Your job can move the goalposts every day, but they cannot make you give a damn. They can make time appear to pass more slowly, but they cannot stop the clock moving.

Keep smiling, pay token homage to their rules, and remember they can do you no lasting harm.

Note to self:

Looks like a Windows beta version of Scrivener is being released shortly before NaNo this year, ready for testing and use. This is the bookwriting software that Mac users use to beat down their hardons in the morning, and I've heard nothing but good about it.

Be sure to snag a copy as soon as it's available.

The State of Play

I think of the stuff I write as being in two categories, the serious and non-serious. The latter are the things I do for Associated Content and the like, and the former are those I actually want to have some quality to them. There IS a certain pride in a decent AC piece, especially one that actually drags in the hits (somehow), but at the end of the day I'm crunching words for a Yahoo! owned website that's universally reviled by most news sites. Some of my more popular ones on there have been the ones I cut and pasted from throwaway pieces of crap I originally tapped up on the horrible Helium. I learned some time ago that carefully crafted and considered pieces invariably get less than a hundred hits, and things I consider garbage seem to go viral unexpectedly. Bizarre, but true.

I seem to knock out far more of the non-serious than the serious at the moment, at least in a publishable form. That is to say, it seems to be the only things I finish right now. I'm hoping this will pick up next month, as it's NaNoWriMo again in November. Right now, I'm wracking my brains to see if I can come up with any concepts, any imagery that'll be fertile enough to drag 50,000 words out of it. If I manage it, it'll be the first time I ever have. This will really be the focus for the rest of the month. Going to try and make passing reference to it here if possible, and certainly going to try and develop this blog throughout that month.

And that's how things stand at the moment. Lots of thinking, not much writing, much optimism. Sick and worn out and stressed, but otherwise things aren't so bad.

An Introduction

I opened this account a while ago, and haven't ever really done anything with it. Going to be using for two things, really; firstly to post anything I write for the likes of Associated Content, a well-hated site that nevertheless pays me surprisingly well for my incoherent ramblings. You may find something that interests you, you may not. I make no guarantees. Click on the links either way, though, I appreciate the page hits.

The second use will be fairly trite, in some ways. I hate to sound all 1980s pop-psychology, but I've come a long way from being myself, or who I consider myself to be. Somewhere along the line, amongst jarring changes in the culture I'm living in, and various other circumstances, my trains of thought have drifted off from what I'd consider my normal, happy self. The self I used to have when I was writing, and posting random shit to my journal. I think I've spent the last few years reacting to being a foreigner in a decidedly odd country, rather than acting like me regardless of where I am. I need to get back on my home turf, even though my home turf is about 4,000 miles away. The home turf of my state of mind, as it were.

Hence the title of this blog. If anything anchors me mentally, it's typing until things make sense. Writing is an enormous outlet for me, a way to rail against the things in life that piss me off, a way to gather my thoughts. A way to a place where I should be, and where those around me deserve me to be.

A way home.