The perennial problem - What the hell to write about

I got a little off-target from my new year’s resolution this month, mostly due to spending the early part of January filled with snot and despair. That’s probably one of the worst colds I’ve had, and the only thing I felt like at the time was a quick, merciful death. Much better now, barring a pulled muscle or something in my side/back that feels like a knife to the ribcage. But only a very small knife.

 

 

Of course, I’m raring to get back into writing something every day, if only for my blog if not actual (*gasp*) fiction. And of course, I can of bugger all to write about. I suspect that piece yesterday about childhood memories and snow is going to get posted whole to AC/yahoo as some kind of prose, partly because I suspect judicious use of keywords like ‘snow’ would be fairly popular right now, but mostly to see if ‘dogshit’ registers on any censorship radars over there.

 

That’s not exactly writing, though. Nor is this, this metawriting bullshit that I’m doing right now, writing about writing without actually writing about much of anything. It’s really just a fallback position for writer’s block. This month, and probably next month, that’s not something I really mind, though. I’m mostly getting into the habit of trying to write something every day. Quality over quantity will hopefully come later. Hell, I wouldn’t mind both at once.

 

It is difficult finding things to write about, mind. It’s a truism that you should write about what you know, but I don’t want to ramble on about my Childhood indefinitely, because that’s really something only I’m interested in, and presumably the idea of a blog is to write about stuff that a hypothetical, invisible (non-existant) audience might find interesting.

 

I have interests I like to write articles about, but to be honest, there’s a pretty limited audience for reviews of Roguelikes. Anyone sufficiently interesting in that type of game invariably knows about the ones knocking around in the first place. Anything more in depth is doomed before it starts. Suppose, for instance, I decided to write a strategy guide for Nethack. They already exist, it’s already been spoiled to death over the last 20 years, there’s strategy guides in abundance already, and it would probably be filled with inaccuracies brought on by having played the damned thing for way too long and building up a collection of bad habits and assumptions. Dog help you too, if there are any errors, or even any questionable suggestions about how to play. I’ve seen dissections of Maniac’s (rather decent) ascension guide that, if printed onto hardcopy, would make respectable phonebook replicas. And they get quite personal, too, in that oddly polite but wounding way you see from veterans of USENET when they decide to wade into a thread with their size 12 boots on.

 

So, nothing roguelikey, then. Except possibly a review of Crawl somewhere with some kind of twist to it. I seem to be well liked by the admins on the forum, and they seem keen on backlinking any mention of the game, which wouldn’t hurt traffic.

 

My interests otherwise are kinda limited. I can be outrageously British and pull a fair bit of attention that way, but there’s another 60 million or so of them out there, and quite a few already have the corner marketed. The Internet does not need another website about cats being amusing. ‘Eating pizza’ is, while popular, something that doesn’t really need much written about it.

 

I read the BBC news daily, not with a view to looking for ideas, but just to keep up on things and get a news source that isn’t too horribly corrupted by US politics and commercial interests. Whatever else you might say about the BBC, they’re reasonably unbiased, or as unbiased as a news center can get. I do tend to keep an eye out for things I could write about though. Again, there’s remarkably little jumping out at me. Nothing I wouldn’t just be repeating parrot-fashion from the original source. I can, in all honesty, see why AC like (and will pay more for) first-person accounts of events. There’s way too many sites around nowadays that do exactly that. I don’t even mean aggregators like Boingboing or Fark or so on, there are hundreds of cookie-cutter news site that just cut and paste stuff in its entirety. I suppose that’s true of most places online nowadays; for every Facebook or Twitter there’s scores of imitators trying to jump on the bandwagon. Total members of these sites: 3. And at least one of those is the developer’s mother. It seems particularly pronounced with any news or article feeds, however.

 

Anyhow, I think this is yet again enough rambling for one day. No real conclusions, no specific, clear-cut ending, no moral to the story.

 

Why, I could be writing about life itself.

 

(AC) Distraction-free Word Processing

I'm reasonably picky when it comes to word processors-slash-text editors; if anything, I'm looking for less features than most offer. I imagine Microsoft Word would be ideal were I trying to put together a presentation for an office meeting, but I really don't need the pages of templates and options for tables and clipart when I'm just typing up a bog-standard article or blog entry, I don't need eighteen pages of settings to tweak. Also, the computers I tend to be using aren't usually on the cutting edge of technology; Word, and its open-source counterpart, OpenOffice, tend to require something capable of launching the Space Shuttle to run smoothly, eating up prodigious amounts of RAM to produce a two-page essay.

(click here for the words that earn me the monies)

Time to try an entirely new setup for writing my stuff and nonsense.

Prior to about a week ago, my setup for writing stuff on the go was the following: Type it up on the Psion, using either the horrible featureless version of Wordpad it had, or the even more clunky and likely to crash Wordmaker. This done, I would then pick a format likely to succeed in being ported over (usually HTML, oddly), save it, save it again on the oddly difficult to detect SD card, and cross my fingers.

When I got home, more fun would ensue. My PC has no slots for SD cards, which I have never been able to fathom, as Kit has the same model PC from the same place, and it has a plethora, a plethora I say, of slots for every card you could conceive of. Undaunted, I would unplug one or two of the USB devices I have installed to accommodate the rather wide SD card adapter I have, open the file on the card, and cut and paste it into wherever I was posting to.

As systems for writing went, it stank to a fair degree. It was time consuming and awkward, and working on files over a period of days was tedious as hell. In fact, it was enough to actually put me off writing things except on my days off, and frankly, on my days off I’ve either other things to do or other things I’d like to do.

In the last week or so, however, I’ve acquired Kit’s old laptop, the one that really hasn’t been used in at least two years. It’s a brand spanking new little Acer laptop, upon which I’ve dual-partitioned with Ubuntu as well as the Windows XP it had already installed, mainly for aesthetic reasons. I’m typing this up on a program called Focuswriter, which is rather like Q10 for windows or Darkroom (I think it’s called) for the Mac; a basic text editor which fills the screen and does nothing else, a nice plain screen you can put text onto without all the fripperies and editing tools that something like OpenOffice or Word throws at you.

When I’m done typing, I save the file into my dropbox folder, another major innovation I’ve only become aware of lately. When the lappie gets in range of a wifi hotspot it can connect to (i.e. at home), it will upload the file to a remote server. My desktop PC will automatically sync with it, and get a copy of the file, ready to go. In other words, the only thing I need to do to share my files across the computers I use is turn the laptop on at some point when I’m home.

Hopefully, all this should see me posting a great deal more online. IF I can actually get into the habit of writing something. Which is the other reason I’m typing this up right now; I figured I’d get started on a New Year’s resolution a couple of days early, see how it sits with me.

So, my resolution is - On workdays at the very least, possibly even on days off, I will attempt to publish at least 500 words online. These will mostly either be on Associated Content, or in the cases of rambling diatribes even I would blush at publishing to try and winkle pennies out of Yahoo, will appear on this blog. If I deem it capable of earning me a few cents and stick it on AC, I’ll link it on the blog anyhow. I’m a very bad judge of what’s worth anything on there anyhow, painstakingly crafted articles seem to earn fuck all, while piles of crap I typed up in two minutes for Helium have gotten 20,000 pagehits. Go figure.

On paper (well, pixel), it sounds doable. We shall see.

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.