Christopher Hamilton

Things have been extremely busy for me lately. There’s been an obscene amount of work going on, and I’ve had a decent amount of nights out recently too. Thankfully though, everything is beginning to wind down to Christmas. There’s still a lot to do at work, but because after Friday the office is closed until the 3rd January, everyone is starting to slow down and only do what really needs to be done.

Unfortunately for me, that involves lots of office moves, which has been leaving me a bit knackered. It adds to the overall feeling of demotivation I’ve been having recently. It’s this demotivation that’s left me unable to do anything worthwhile when I get home, except cook, and watch TV. I have ideas for things that I want to write, but I’m struggling to articulate them properly.

My hope is that once I get some time away from the office, I’ll be able to relax and start writing again. It’s a shame the break is only for two weeks. I wish it was much, much longer, but I’ll take what I can get at this point.

Only three and a half more days to go. I can’t wait.

I’ve been contemplating redesigning the site for the new year. I don’t envision there being huge changes, but I’ve been thinking of creating a new, and much better looking, banner for one thing. I might also tinker with various subtle aspects of the design.

Or I might do a complete overhaul.

I’m not entirely sure yet. Once I get started I may want to do more, I may not.

One thing that is going to be absolutely necessary though, is to tidy up the CSS behind the scenes. There are so many redundant sections in my CSS file now that it makes editing anything a bit of a nightmare.

I’m also thinking of injecting a little colour into the site. I’m not going to go crazy, but it’s beginning to bore me in it’s current incarnation.

So, if for any reason between now and the 31st things go a bit nutty, you now know why.

This years NaNoWriMo didn’t go according to plan, in fact it really didn’t go anywhere at all.

I’ve been pretty stressed out for most of this month, (and the one before to be honest), and when it came to sit down and write for it I lost interest after about an hour. That was one of the contributing factors to the scrapping of not one, but two attempts at it.

It didn’t stop me writing in general. It only stopped anything to do with the story from flowing, and when you have a 30 day deadline that becomes a huge disadvantage. There was one bright point from the whole fiasco. I now have several pages of my Moleskine filled with ideas for blog posts, articles, short stories, and the other day a pretty decent idea for a novel popped into my head at the very unfortunate time of 1am. It kept me awake until about 5am, at which point I crashed out only to wake up a couple of hours later for work.

I really like NaNoWriMo, but it was unfortunate that my head wasn’t into it this year. I imagine I’ll take part again next year, and actually write something. Until then I have a decent amount of ideas to develop and see what I can do with them.

I’ve put a few projects on hold recently, and instead I plan to start them in the new year. At this time of year it’s tough to force myself to spend an significant amount of time devoted to any of them. I usually have the attention span of a gold fish about this point of year, making juggling more than a few things a complete nightmare.

My hope is that by making the decision to put these projects on hold, it will make me less stressed in the run up to Christmas. Which should also allow me the time to get a few annoying things out of the way before the New Year. Which really isn’t that far off anymore.

I’m a little bummed that I didn’t manage to finish Nano, since I started it with a pretty good idea of what I wanted to write. It’s not the end of the world I suppose, but it would have been good to have managed it for the second year in a row.