( Ohai Winter )

April 21, 2013


It's been a stupidly long time since I have written anything for this place. I'll put it down to the fact that we are between seasons and my mood was sour on account of that. More truthfully, though, work has been crazy and when I get home in the evenings, the most I can do is call for wine and turn on the television. Thus: winter is coming and work is hard.

Nevertheless, I shall persevere! I have emerged from my transitional slump filled with the fire of productivity, determined to populate the internet with my rubbish and perhaps make a valid point or two along the way. More importantly though, winter is here (at least, it certainly feels that way in Cape Town) and I plan to spend this one quietly banging away at my novel, improving my Photoshop skills and undertaking the odd writing project here and there. And while I'm not as inclined to talk about my novel as I had originally thought, I will mention the other two in some detail.

During one of my many, endless web trawling sessions, I stumbled across the Pugly Pixel blog. The blog itself is incredibly good-looking, and informative; interesting too. And then I discovered that Katrina, who writes the blog and describes herself as a 'web design enthusiast', offers these great Photoshop tutorials. Now, I have only been an ardent lover of Photoshop for the last year or so, but have always nurtured an interest in design. And while I know people can come to understand Photoshop intuitively and completely on their own, I don't have that kind of time. So I'm going to try out some of her tutorials and maybe, if it looks nice, I'll put them up here. Maybe.

In other news, anyone who has ever heard me talk about books and authors and great writers in general will know who Chuck Wendig is (aside from my literary spirit animal, I mean) and the man authors one of the best blogs on the internet, in my opinion: Terrible Minds. On Fridays, he issues a Flash Fiction Challenge. And I think it's high time that I got up off my rump and started participating. His challenges are fun and interesting, different and, well, challenging. It's an excellent way to keep in the swing of things and my new found purpose is to do as many of these as life allows; they'll be going up here too, for your reading pleasure (or, you know, not... anyway...).

'Tis the season of betterment, readers, and the aforementioned will be how I shall attempt this... betterment. (I scoff in its general direction!). Whether I'll actually achieve something meaningful, as with all forms of betterment, remains to be seen.

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