Well it’s that time of the year again – I mean of course the month of November – and as usual NaNoWriMo has me writing like a madman.

But nearly two weeks in, and already well past the target for the entire month, there’s time to do a bit of blogging. In many ways I have to admit I feel like I’m still recovering from the first two days of the month. Given the fact that my decision to attack my one day record – which had been just over 16k since 2008 – ended with me reaching 50k on November 2nd.

After thinking about it for what seems like forever I’ve finally decided to go ahead and import everything from my old blog into the new setup. This means that http://jarsto.nl/blog/ officially no longer does anything, so I’ve gone ahead and set up a .htaccess redirect for it.

I’ve been doing something new (or at least new to me) this year: I’ve been trying to keep track of all the books I read. Actually I only started doing this around the 18th of April, but I’ve managed to reconstruct the list for pretty much all of this year so far. But I do have one problem: I can’t quite define ‘book’ in a way that really satisfies me.

It’s been far too long since I’ve done anything on this site, something I keep meaning to remedy but never seem to quite get around to. Finally some activity today though: I’ve managed to make a selection from the photos I took on a trip to Andalusia with my father about a month and a half ago and put them up in the Photo’s section.

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

This saying is commonly attributed to either Mark Twain, or Benjamin Disraeli. I was tempted, given the subject of this post, to look for some statistics on which is the more frequent attribution, but finally decided not to bother. I’ll be introducing one set of statistics shortly, and one is really enough. Judging by the length of this post, more than enough.

I recently managed to get my hands on a lot of old recordings of the BBC Radio 4 show Just a Minute. It’s a fun gameshow where contestants (mainly comedians) are challenged to speak without repetition, deviation or hesitation for one minute on a subject assigned to them by the chairman.

It’s a good listen just for the fun of it, but I particularly like listening to it these days, because I’ve been thinking a lot about ethics for my NaNoWriMo project this year. Now what does ethics have to do with gameshows you may ask?

Yes, November is approaching once more, so it’s time for me to start worrying about NaNoWriMo. And the first major worry this year was finding a title for my NaNo project.

I’ve had characters and a story in mind for months now, but a title, even a working title, was proving illusive. Finally though I’ve settled on Pure Time as a working title. Both to reflect the time-travel aspects of the story (pure time is a timeline without any time-travel incursions) and to reflect the moral dilemma I’m about to inflict on one of my characters.

The origin of the idea of Pure Time as a title was Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. That got me to Critique of Pure Time. But that seemed slightly to elitist as a title. I may change my mind about that later, but for now Pure Time will do as a working title.

Yes, it’s finally happened. After way too long not doing anything on the old site, I’ve decided to put up an entirely new look, and start putting some stuff online again. Hopefully I should be blogging more than about once a year from now on.

I’m not sure whether or not I’ll import all the stuff from the old blog to this one. For now though you can still see it here.

I haven’t been doing enough on the Gordian Knot edit lately, but today I took a fresh look at it. And though it’s taken me quite a while I’ve come to a decision: I’m going to break one of the rules I’ve set myself and not finish this draft.

I’ve been struggling with this for a while now, but after a lot of thought I’ve had to conclude that finishing this draft just wouldn’t be worth the time it would take. The edit has been an “off and on” project for too long, and my general writing style now isn’t what it was when I started the edit, so it would never truly read as one draft anyway.

On top of that I’ve been doing quite a bit of work on, and thinking about, the stories background recently. Adding in a lot of new worldbuilding, and rethinking some of the old. Once that process is complete it will need one or two major, and a lot more minor, changes to the narrative even in its second draft form.

All of which means that, all things considered, starting over from scratch once the worldbuilding is ready seems like the right thing to do. That will finally place my characters, and their actions, in the sort of rich universe I feel I’ve only been simulating thus far.

It will mean I need to put in more time to get a new draft ready, but I’m convinced it will be a better draft as a result. I’m hoping to map out a preliminary time-line with various targets on it tomorrow. And while I can’t guarantee I’ll keep to it, my current aim is to blog more actively about the project as it progresses.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I really need to return to pondering faster than light sensor technology…

As those who follow me on twitter will know, I’ve been doing without my PC for a few days now. Not because I want to, but because my motherboard decided to short out on me. Even though this is not a nice experience, there are some positive sides to it. Granted, I’m not sure I’d see any positives if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve been able to re-purpose my file server to serve as a temporary desktop without too much trouble.

But as I do have my re-purposed file server keeping me connected to the essentials I’ve decided to do a little blog post about the surprising positives I’ve noticed in being cut off from my regular PC. Not that I’d recommend anyone get their mboard shorted out just to experience these…

Item One

I no longer have all the links I’d normally take for granted in my bookmarks, toolbar, and history. This may sound like a weird positive, but I find it is. It’s made me realise just how much of a creature of habit I really am. There are sited I visit regularly, sites I know the address off, which I simply can’t be bothered to go to when I have to actually type that address. Not bothering with those sites has left me the time to do a lot more reading than I had been doing for a while.

Item Two

Another positive thing for me is that lacking my PC has forced me to make some decisions. I’d been thinking about a Magnatune streaming membership for quite a while, but I only got around to actually getting one because I’ve been cut off from all the music that’s stored on my desktop. As a result I’ve listened to, and enjoyed, more new music in the last few days than in the previous month or so.

Item Three

Related to the missing links, but a little different, I’ve found that aside from my browsing habits my routine has also changed a little. Most the changes aren’t massive, I’ve made sure my backup desktop is now running pretty much the same software my PC normally uses, but it has made me reconsider other things – like that large number of RSS feeds I’m subscribed to, even though I mostly click “Mark All Read” because I haven’t the time to read them. I’ve already mentally scheduled a thorough RSS cleanup for when the PC is up and running again.

Looking Back

So what do I feel looking back after a few days? Well I’ll still be glad tomorrow when I can pick up my new board and get my regular PC up and running again. But even so these intervening days haven’t been as bad as I’d first thought they might be. And the replacement I’ve ordered – replacing mboard, proc & memory – is also an upgrade that should put off the need to buy a new PC entirely at least a while longer.

And of course when I do get the (upgraded) PC back up and running I can carry some of the changes to my routine made during the last few days back there. That way the crash may actually have a positive effect in the long term.