Updates on my diary, which I have continued rather than starting this month. Sometimes you can’t write because you haven’t done the things you like to write about. Sometimes you can’t write because you don’t feel you can articulate things correctly. I write anyway most of the time.

I’m trying to write more, but who for?

A post reflecting on the highs and lows of 2023, including travel, books, work, movies etc.

Because I am bored of forgetting what’s in my website’s Rakefile, I thought I’d write a list. Also, as I’m probably going to move over to a node based approach soon, it’s a handy wish list for my package.json file when the time comes. Make a new post in _posts named “Title” rake post["Title"] If no title is given, you will be prompted for one. The post will be opened in the editor specified in the Rakefile.

I began writing this post after realising that it is the first of June and I might as well attempt once more to write a post every day. The speed with which the first of the month comes around, inviting another such promise, always amuses me. But at the moment I am not sure whether this blog will still exist come the end of the month. I think I want to start again in pastures new.

The Imaginary Girlfriend is a short autobiography by American author John Irving. In it, he explains the interwoven roles of writing and wrestling in his life. As always with Irving, the book is absorbing from the off, and it’s tempting to use the anecdotes here to explain why most of his novels seem to have an underdog narrating them. It’s because he loves the work of Dickens so much. I kid.

This post explains some of the modifications I made to a minimal Jekyll theme to get this blog as I wanted it. This blog (currently) uses the excellent Sidey theme by Ronalds Vilciņš. His site looks eerily similar to this one, at least at time of writing. The theme is pretty minimal in terms of features (and appearance) but it scores well on the Google Page Speed test. The features I added have increased the build time, but have not affected the speed of the site in terms of the page speed test.

While sprucing up this blog a bit during lockdown, I fell into reading my old posts about South America. I enjoyed it, mostly for the memories, but also because the current lockdown is warping my sense of time and space. Hours feel like weeks, but then I blink and a month’s gone by. I find myself traipsing similar orbits each day around the house, and then perhaps over to the supermarket or the park.

Back in 2012 I wrote a post listing my ambitions for the future. Well it’s the future now isn’t it? Almost. After all, I’m a whole new person now. Anyway it’s probably time to take stock. Have I achieved any of them? Have any of my ambitions changed? What’s replaced the things that I’ve decided not to worry about? What has come after the things I managed to do? First off, here’s my justification for writing the list in the original post:

As much as I hate to write about writing, especially when I write so infrequently, I feel I need to reboot this blog. I wrote so few posts in recent months I considered giving up altogether. I’ve been stressed. Sometimes this manifests in being unable to sleep. Sometimes it manifests in all my interests and ideas seeming to be completely pointless. Sometimes one of those precedes the other. Sometimes it works vice versa.

This year promises to be exciting so this week I tried to buy a diary. One of those day-to-a-page affairs for scribbling down all the things I’ve seen and learned about. I thought they might be cheap now the calendar is turning to February. No such luck. There were a few week-to-view diaries going for half price in Waterstones but nothing suitable for my needs. I have lots of Field Notes notebooks if my urge to write gets too much to resist.

Three years ago today I moved in to my little flat in Chichester, soon to start a new job. I had no money left but at least, after a character building stint of six months sleeping on the floor, I had a bed. In the intervening three years, my job role has expanded, I’ve done another degree, the flat has become a home, and I’ve met and married Ingrid. Add to that the fact that it’s almost four years since I left for South America and I start to realise that I’ve done a crazy amount of things in that time.

In my last post, I wrote about hills. I tried to use them as a metaphor to explain nagging sense of incompletion when you single out one activity over another. The feeling that there’s always a more exciting hill off in the distance to go climb, instead of the one you’re on. I said my next post would be about how to pick between different options, particularly when you have many to choose from.

It can be a struggle to keep writing. I’ve found this happened a lot since I moved the blog. First, there was the business of moving things over. That meant a lot of thought about old posts and which ones I should keep. A lot of the time I thought “how on earth did I have time to write this?!” Then there seemed to be a lot more barriers to writing than previously.

Moving the blog to Jekyll (again, sort of) Et voila, my blog lives! In a new body (Jekyll) and at a new location. The Process I set up Jekyll on my MacBook Air after loads of initial problems with installing the theme and getting assorted Ruby gems installed and working. Stack Overflow is a friend for life now. By way of comparison, getting things up and running on my new Mac was simple.

Witness the pressure of a new notebook. You sit at your desk, trying to get it started with an amazing piece of writing. Something worthy of that crisp new page. You want it to tumble out of you, fully formed and coherent. Something that justifies you abandoning the previous one. As though first drafts don’t exist. You cast yourself into the role of shaman, of seer - of someone gifted a prophetic vision.

A little man wearing a bow tie, and possibly a fez, scurries into the middle of the frame clutching a clapboard. Breathing heavily he hoists the clapboard up to chest height. He holds the clapper up then brings down while slurring "This is a blog post about not having a clue, take 43". He exits to the right of the frame. My feet are hot. The bed seems too small. Why are my feet always too hot on nights like these?

Time for a little gear review. This is the Logitech K380 keyboard. It pairs with devices wirelessly over Bluetooth. I bought it to use with my Apple TV, iPad and iPhone. It runs on 2 AAA batteries, but the supplied batteries are not rechargeable. The keyboard is light and portable but you definitely know you have it in your bag. It’s lovely to type on. For a go-anywhere keyboard it has a surprisingly nice feel to the keys.

I am writing a long post that I will either publish as one long post (about five or six thousand words) or as about seven smaller ones each closer to the average post length of about eight hundred words. I have to get it out-of-the-way soon as my mind needs to focus on my health economics essay. It is hard to write short posts to a timetable, let alone churn out long posts on a regular basis.

A few months ago I wrote about an idea for a novel that I’d abandoned. I mentioned in that post that I’d abandoned it because there was another idea that I wanted to pursue. The working title for it is “Untitled 2”. (It isn’t really, I have an actual working title that would give things away or would at least make me feel like the idea was out in the world.

There is so much good writing out there. All you have to do is fire up the guardian website, or download the medium app to your smartphone, or visit my friend Barrie’s site, or Lee’s, and so on and so on. When it comes to my little whisper into this great choir, it’s easy to feel a bit intimidated. How do I add my voice? How do I feel distinct? How do I do it as well as all these other wonderful writers?

Last night an impromptu firework display occurred. I watched it from my bathroom window. Very pretty and somewhat extravagant, given that there’s no reason for one on the calendar. I could have filmed it on meerkat but it would have diminished the spectacle. However, it did at least motivate me to write this piece that I have put off for a while (since about November I guess?). One where I find out (i.

I’m pretty close to a round number. To date I have written 298,500 words for this blog, not counting posts that I have discarded or deleted. This will be the 505th post currently on the blog, which makes for an average of just under 600 words per post. Some posts are just a picture or a video or a gallery though, so that distorts the average a bit. I don’t think I can write the 1500 words I need to hit 300,000 in this post.

I set myself the task of writing about a fictional character for this blog post, so this post is about Jackson X. His surname isn’t really X, it’s just one of the details about him that I haven’t fleshed out yet. This is because Jackson X is the one of the protagonists of the novel I’m (not) writing. The name of the novel is “The Summer of the Giant Space Whale”.

Overlong reflection upon the past is one sure way to make yourself unhappy so I try to avoid it. Nevertheless it becomes unavoidable at this time of year, especially if, like me, you are somewhat prone to reflection. At this time last year I was, as detailed in the most recent report of my South American adventure, in La Paz, Bolivia. I think I felt as lost then as I do now, though back then I had the novelty of new places and good friends to steer me through.

I recently started a new job and moved in to a new flat. This means I’m too busy to write any long blog posts at the moment. Also I’m still not quite at home there, so I tend to spend my evenings tidying up or setting up new things. It’s a shame because I have plenty of things to write about (even without observations on moving, starting a new job, etc) but I guess the writing will happen eventually…

What it is Ulysses is a markdown editor for the Mac. It has a simple drafting model that makes it easy to organise ideas and move between them. Pieces of writing are represented as sheets that can be tagged and grouped together - the grouping can be made manually or using filters. There are no files, the sheets are entries in a single database that is synced with iCloud. Because everything is plain text it won’t eat up your storage space.

I have now been writing decent length articles on this site for about a year. I have learned a lot in this time, mostly about writing but also how to express your feelings and how to marshal your ideas and passions into action. For this month’s “five on the fifth”, I would like to share with you some of the things I have learned. Writing posts consistently is hard… There are a lot of things that get in the way of regular posting.