Ian Betteridge

I missed out on my week note last week because I was incredibly tired, and when I’m too tired to write you know it’s really something. I was trying to contain a lot of work-related stress: Sunday night, I slept until 3 am and woke up with my head spinning, and the same on Monday night.

Fortunately I know enough about how that pans out to immediately put up the emergency bat-signal at work and talk to my team about it, which of course helped, and then we worked out what it was I was fretting about and sorted that out. Cue solid seven hour nights from then on, and a much happier Ian.

I have been through this kind of thing a couple of times before and it always happens when for one reason or another I lose focus. I do not thrive when I try and take on too much – I end up circling around a bunch of thing and trying to do them all at once, which of course means I don’t actually do any of them to be best of my ability. That creates a nasty little feedback loop, and what clears it is always sitting down, getting my focus back on one thing per day, and breaking that cycle.

One Saturday night we had a trip into town to go to the Free Range open mic night, where one of our friends was doing a performance involving sculpture and inviting the audience up to interact with them and, if they wanted, read from the texts on them. It was a lot of fun and involved three whole pints which is an event rare enough to be fun and get me quite drunk. The days when I could drink all night are long, long gone.

I’m trying to consolidate all the online storage I have into less places. My subscription to Office 365 is up soon and I’m almost certainly going to give it up: I have access to the Office suite through work if I need it, and I prefer using Nisus Writer as a word processor and Scrivener or Ulysses for writing more generally. Dropbox is also going, as I don’t need it either – I’ll probably consolidate all my cloud storage into iCloud. I’ve been testing Nextcloud and it’s good, but unless I’m migrating away from everything else it’s just another thing to keep track of.

This week I have been reading…

A swift canter through Ken MacLeod’s Beyond the reach of Earth, which was OK. I often find the second volume of a trilogy is the low point, as you never find out whatever the “big reveal” is likely to be and quite often the series seems to be treading water.

I also finished Neal Asher’s Jack Four, and am half way through it. It was a bit Asher-by-numbers, with that blend of hard SF and horror which makes him a fun read, but I saw the twist at the end coming when I had read about 50 pages which made it more than a bit unsatisfying. It would have been more fun had that twist been something entirely different.

Neal’s an interesting character. We used to chat a bit on social media (back in the days when social media was a bit move conversational and a bit less performative) and although our politics are worlds apart I always liked him. His beloved wife passed away a few years ago and it really seemed to hit him hard. I hope that he’s in a better place now.

I finished Claire Keegan’s Foster which was an absolute delight. It’s a long short story, not even long enough to call it a novella, but it’s just a beautiful piece of writing. Highly recommended.

All that has taken me to five books this month and twelve for the year so far. Next up is Julia Armfield’s Our wives under the sea which I’m looking forward to as I loved her short story collection Salt Slow. I have booked myself on to another Arvon writing course later in the year and Julia is one of the tutors, so it will be interesting to learn more about how she writes.

This week I have been writing…

I worked a bit on the Shaye and La Muerte stories, but I’m feeling a yen to go back to something which isn’t fantastical for a while. Also I should just complete something. That would be nice.

Bit of an abbreviated week note as we have not long got back from seeing my sister up in Suffolk. The last time we were up there, about a month ago, I bought a picture in a little art exhibition – and today was when I could collect it.

My little office is slowly taking shape!

Writing

I’ve been writing a bit of a blog post/rant about British technology journalism and quite how stuck in the past of CIX, “kit”, “your scribe”, and using “we think” for an article written by a single solitary person. Still, I don’t know if I’ll ever publish it because it’s a bit shouty. And the readers aren’t much better (see every comment thread on The Register for more).

I also wrote something about Substack Notes, published it on Substack, and then realised that I already loathed Substack enough to want to delete my account – which I promptly did.

Reading

I finally finished Becky Chambers’ Record of a Spaceborn Few after a month of putting it down and picking it back up again. It took quite a while for me to get into it: Chambers’ work is heavily character-driven, and this one weaves together the narratives of quite a few characters. But after about halfway, when there’s a single point of plot which changes the whole thrust of the book, I raced through it. And (not for the first time in her work) I got a little emotional.

I love how she writes: I’m almost sad that there’s only The Galaxy, and the Ground Within and To be taught, if fortunate left to read. But I’m taking a break and diving into Ken MacLeod’s Beyond the reach of Earth instead, just for a bit of a change of pace.

I also quickly finished Make Something Wonderful, the collection of speeches and quotes from Steve Jobs created by the Steve Jobs Archive (and available for download for free). I am very familiar with almost everything in it. Jobs, and Apple, were the subject of my work for many years, and the return of Jobs to Apple happened when I was actively reporting on the company. But seeing all this familiar material laid out as part of a historical narrative makes it clear how much Jobs developed throughout his life. Of course, he wasn’t a saint; this isn’t a biography. But it’s taking the best of a person and using it to inspire thinking in others, which is no bad thing.

Everyone I know has been desperate to get to the release of the bank holiday weekend, four days when you don't have to think about work. Or at least a day when you have the hangover of whatever was happening at work, two days of not thinking about work, and then a day of anticipating being back at work.

That's been the pattern of much of my life. I have never been good at getting enough rest, although it's notable that over the past couple of days, I have had more sleep than usual. I've been exhausted: getting to bed between 10-11pm and hitting sleep well before midnight, both of which are pretty unusual for me. Perhaps, finally, I am learning to rest.

This week I have been writing...

Outlining never feels like writing, which is why I hate doing it. It's a necessary evil, though. Without an outline, I get bogged down in the minutiae of the scene, and they drift on... and on... and on...

This week I have been reading and watching

The Mandalorian this week was best described as "absolute trash". With guest appearances all over the place, the writing on it felt really weak compared to the last few episodes. Very disappointing. And that's about all we have watched this week: it's very much been a "not much TV" kind of time.

I have, though, laid in yet more books on to the "to read" pile. From the second-hand heaven that is Ghost Papa in Margate came Mick Farren's Give the anarchist a cigarette, which details his days from early beatnik in Ladbroke Grove to drug-smashed former hippy turned punk in... Ladbroke Grove. And alongside Farren came DM Thomas' The White Hotel: Thomas, too, was tangential to the same scene in the '60s, with much of his early poetry published in New Worlds magazine alongside the likes of M John Harrison, JG Ballard and (of course) Michael Moorcock.

Also purchased: Julia Armfield's Our wives under the sea. I like her collection Salt Slow a lot, and I'm keen to see how this one goes.

Is it just me or are the weeks at the moment a weird mix of being both extraordinarily long and incredibly short? It’s like time is bending in on itself somehow.

Despite the snow, this is the time of year when the garden starts to spring into life. The daffodils are out and weren’t muscled into submission by the cold. There are small rabbits, this year’s batch, bouncing around the garden. They will sit outside our patio doors eating the odd blade of grass because they haven’t yet learned that humans are an immense threat, but they are wary.

Yesterday we went into that there London to see Travis Alabanza’s Burgerz at the Southbank. It was magnificent: alternately funny and heartbreaking and an absolute wake-up call that trans people need our support because what they are going through is terrifying. If you get a chance, see it – or if you don’t, get the book.

There are many things about living in London which I don’t miss. Even though I grew up in (what became) a city, the council estate I was born on was right on the edge of it. The countryside was a ten-minute cycle ride away, and of course, if you head north from Derby you are very quickly into some of the country’s most beautiful landscape. Where I live now is also on the edge of a city, although Canterbury is a very different one from Derby.

What I definitely miss about London, though, is the culture. The ability to get on a tube and 30 minutes later be in the National Gallery, or the V&A, or on the Southbank was brilliant. Despite its rich history Canterbury is a bit of a cultural wasteland: if you want art or interesting events, you have to head to the coast. Ramsgate, Folkestone, and of course, Margate are all more culturally rich than Canterbury, which is in thrall to its past. Never live in a place where half the city centre is a world heritage site.

I finally caved in and bought Elden Ring, after about a billion people recommended it. I’m only a few hours in – five hours play time, apparently – and I’m not that impressed. I think my issue is that the world is just too open: and so far, at least, there isn’t much in the way of a world to interact with. All I’ve done is kill things and die, with a smearing of a story on top. Maybe I need to explore more, but so far it feels dull and very focused on grinding.

Getting it running meant getting my gaming laptop updated and working well again. It’s been about six months since I started it up, as I dropped out of playing Elder Scrolls Online after playing it consistently. I think I will get back into it once I’ve been through some of Elden Ring (enough to confirm that I don’t like it). MMORPGs have been a consistent part of my life for over 20 years after I first started playing Ultima Online. From UO, I went to Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, and then ESO. I even have a statue of an orc riding a warg, which was sent out by WoW to everyone who had played for ten years from the start (I was actually in before then, in beta).

This will be a bit of an abbreviated weeknote because I have a lot to work on today. In particular, I want to get some more writing done because I have been a TOTAL WRITING SLACKER this week. Although that wasn’t all my fault.

I spent a couple of days this week with work in Poland. The main thing that I’m working on currently is an international project, which means I spend a lot of time with colleagues in Poland and Germany on Microsoft Teams calls. It was good to meet some of them face-to-face for the first time.

It was a flying visit both literally and figuratively, as I flew out from Stansted on Tuesday morning for meetings in the afternoon, stayed over for more meetings the following morning, then back to the UK in the evening. My biggest discovery (apart from I know not a single word of Polish) was that I like pierogies, especially when it has potatoes in it.

Flying, though, is not something I enjoy that much. Back in the late 90s/early 2000s I did a lot of it, mostly transatlantic, and it cured me of any notion of flying as romantic or exciting. I enjoy new places, but the logistics of flying in the post-9/11 era are just painful. Both Stansted and Modlin are small airports, which are usually more interesting and fast to fly from than big ones like Heathrow, but even so it’s just a dull and stressful way to travel. Next time I could go by train – it takes a day, but that’s all time when you can work (and I quite fancy the idea of going from London to Amsterdam to Berlin to Warsaw as it sounds quite intriguing and romantic).

Even though the trip only took a couple of days, it dominated the week. I had to stay over at Stansted on Monday night, as getting there for an 8am flight (arriving two hours earlier) would have been brutally hard. Add in packing time, returning time, unpacking and all the other things which surround the act of travel, and you have much of the week disappearing into nothing, or, as Jerry Pournelle used to say, “the time was eaten by locusts”.

What I've been writing

And suddenly this week I realised that I had the first draft of a chapter, which was a lot more than I thought I had achieved. What I actually need to do with that story is sit down and do a proper plot for it. One of the things that I have noticed about writing is I tend to dive in and write, then lose the will to live as I try and “pants it”. I have a rough outline, but it’s not enough: I need to think more carefully about what each scene is there to do, and how it advances the story. Of course, I can change it as I go along – I’m not going to turn down a great scene which doesn’t relate to the plot at the point of writing – but at least if I have a more detailed outline I can see the way forward when my writing gets into the weeds.

That’s part of the fun of what I’m doing: I’m learning how to write in a way which is unfamiliar and which challenges me. And I am definitely not too old for a challenge!

What I've been reading and watching

Reading has been a bit slow this week, although I got a fair amount done on the trip. I’ve been reading Constance, by Matthew Fitzsimmons, which is a sort of techno-thriller which I think I picked up as a freebie on Amazon Prime. It’s OK, but not my usual genre, and I can almost see the plot laid out before me just from having read the first chapter.

One thing I had noticed about myself is my tendency to drift into comfort reading, going through books that I have read before and which I find both easy and relaxing. I did some of that earlier this year when I raced through Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, and I am doing a bit of it again at the moment.

This time round it’s a drift through Arthur C Clarke’s Tales from The White Hart. It’s a collection of short stories written in the “club tales” style, which was popular in the early part of the 20th century. This takes the form of several short stories which are all bookended as if they were being told in a pub or club, and it’s a nice conceit. It would be interesting to do something reinventing that style for the age of the internet. What’s the equivalent of the club tale for the internet age? The Reddit romp?

Looking through some old documents, I rediscovered Cory's notes on a talk that Danny gave at Notcon in 2004 on todo.txt (I might even have been there, who knows?) Todo.txt was (and still is) a text-based format for task management designed to be incredibly simple to use and -- most importantly -- to be completely portable. The bare bones details of it are, of course, on Github, and there are apps around that support it for every platform you can think of.

I have grown to love systems like this for a bunch of reasons. First, tools which start off with the simplest and most human-readable file formats are likely to have longevity over ones which hide their content inside a database. The popularity of formats like Markdown (which I am of course, writing this in) demonstrates that. Todo.txt is 20 years old and still bubbling under. Can you still access your to-do list from 20 years ago?

(Although, of course, the inevitable rejoinder to that is, "and why would I want to?")

Second, they are canonical examples of creating tools that are capable of being used in incredibly simple ways to start with. You can start using it with just a text file, any editor you like, and a list of tasks with no fancy bullets. You don't even have to add prioritisation if you don't want to, although that's a good place to start! You can use GTD-style projects and contexts... or not. And of course, if you want to add your own metadata, you can.

That's the opposite of tools like Things, Todoist, Microsoft To do or the million and one other apps which promise to sort out your productivity through the power of technology. Nothing can do that -- the only thing that can is you writing things down, reflecting on them, and hopefully somewhere in the middle of those two activities doing whatever you need to do.

In other digital archaeology, I also found that Maelstrom 3.0 is available for Mac, Windows and Linux. Damn, where did that week go?

At the start of the week, I was also doing quite a bit of thinking about AI tools like the new Bing Chat (which Microsoft is now trying to reign back into being just a conversations search tool) and how they will impact on publishing. Short version: they will encourage a race to the bottom in quality, but that will mean a premium gets put on what you might call "handmade content". This has been the story of every technology so I don't think writing will prove to be anything different.

You never know. Maybe the inevitable profits from this will go to universal basic income and a four day work week rather than lining the pockets of capitalists. Ha ha who am I kidding?

Stuff I've written

I have basically written a big update to my article on how to get Scrivener working on Linux (I've found a reasonably reliable way of making it work on Fedora too) but need to do an edit before I post it. It's basically a ground-up write and much improved.

Stuff I've been reading and watching

I had thought that Twitter's decision to limit SMS-based 2FA was stupid because they retained a notably insecure authentication method for paying customers, but Ricky Mondello's article on it changed my mind: it's stupid because they aren't retaining it for everyone. Ricky works for Apple on stuff like the iOS/macOS password management features, so they know what they're talking about.

This week I made a quick canter through Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers. I had forgotten quite how little the book is satire and quite how much it's a distillation of Heinlein's political ideas written into what we would now call a "young adult" novel. I loved that book as a kid for all the reasons that kids love good YA fiction: it doesn't patronise, and it makes you feel like you're reading something just a little more grown-up than you should.

Fortunately, I also read M John Harrison's The Centauri Device around the same time, which is very much not a YA book but had an equal and opposite effect on my young politics. I must be due a read of that again soon.

It's been a week of what I would call "faffing": poking around at the decaying corpses of ideas and projects and deciding whether they are, in fact, dead and it's time to move on or they might -- just might -- have a chance of resurrection. Spoilers: most of them were, in fact, deceased.

I did a bit of technology faffing too. I wanted to update my guide to getting Scrivener up and running on Linux to include Fedora, which didn't work the last time I tried it. I had some ideas on how to get it running but didn't have anything with Fedora on it. So I backed up my ThinkPad, wiped everything and did a Fedora install. Yes, I could have used a virtual machine. No, I didn't want to do that because I love tinkering.

After a few days of fighting with Wine, I gave up. I got a lot closer to making it work -- this time around I could get Scrivener installed and running, but couldn't register it. I know what the problem is, and it's a weird one which can be fixed by installing the Microsoft Speech API, but unfortunately, I just couldn't get that to work. Precisely the same process and packages work fine on Ubuntu-based systems, so it's something odd and unique about Fedora. Eventually, I gave up.

So as well as a trip to Whitstable for a ridiculous sandwich at Grain and Hearth, yesterday involved rebuilding the ThinkPad using Pop!OS, and restoring from backup. I pondered going to Ubuntu 22.10 instead but decided I would miss the tiled windowing system of Pop. It's a little overdue an update, as System76 are rewriting the entire user interface in Rust, but it still feels a lot more friendly than Ubuntu. Opinionated, but in a good way.

When exactly did I become a Linux user? Although I'm tempted to blame Cory for this, the serious answer is "since Microsoft started turning Windows into the kind of system which reports back far too much user data and effectively spies on you." I don't mind optional telemetry going back to developers to improve software, and when it's opt-in I generally do exactly that. But Windows seems to be heading on a track to being a giant data capture system to power Microsoft's advertising growth, which makes me really uncomfortable. I should probably write something longer about this at some point.

Of course I'm still knee-deep in Macs and other Apple devices. But I really enjoy using the ThinkPad with PopOS. It takes more time to set up and tune to precisely what your needs are, but once you've done that it's simple, reliable and doesn't tell a vast company exactly what you're doing all the time.

What I've been writing

Having invested that time in failing to make Scrivener work on Fedora I have completely rewritten my blog post, and it's almost ready to be published. It's been a sluggish week on the fiction side though. I revisited an idea I had a while ago for a series of interconnected stories about a girl in a post-apocalyptic world who makes friends with Death (they bond over a scrawny chicken). It's fun just writing a set of little stories in the same world without having an overarching structured narrative. While the story takes them about four billion years into the future, everything is just character development. And it has a nice ending, deep at the end of time.

What I've been reading and watching

Having finished John Sculley's Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple, I've picked up Gareth Powell's About writing again. It's an interesting book, but it is a bit like a compilation of blog posts. Nothing wrong with that, but it means it's not really all that structured. If you want a book about the work of writing, Antony Johnston's The Organised Writer is better, and if you want a book about the craft of writing, there are a lot of other options. It's not bad, but if you know much about writing, I think you will breeze through it.

This week we watched -- finally -- the first episode of Happy Valley, and that was enough for me. I didn't like it at all. Too graphic in a way which felt like it was going to appeal to voyeuristic sadists who enjoy making women suffer.

Meanwhile, there was the first episode of series three of Picard, which picked up where the last series left off by being nowhere near as good as the first one. And has everyone forgotten that Picard is an android now? That feels like it might be important to how other people treat him, but it's ignored.

Sometimes weeks are quite fractured and this was one of those. Bitty. Lots of little things happening which get in the way of doing an actual project. The kind of week where work of all kinds of a bit three steps forward and two steps back.

I have been spending too much time tinkering with technology and not enough doing the things which actually matter: reading, writing, culture and people.

Some of what I need to do is get my little office space more sorted. It’s about 50% there, but I need to do some rearranging of furniture to make it Just so. The new chair is good. It’s really nice to be in a chair with some lumbar support. I didn’t know that I needed it until the moment I had it, then I realised I really did need it a lot.

I’ve also switched over to using the Keychron K2 keyboard, which I think suits my writing style a lot more than the Das Keyboard. The Das Keyboard is built like a tank and gives a really satisfying keyboard action and THUNK but I think I prefer the feel of the K2 overall. It’s a little softer and nicer to type on for someone – like me – used to using a laptop keyboard. The one thing that I’m not 100% sure about yet is what angle to have it at. The highest angle is too sharp. The middle one feels OK and I suspect is better for my posture. The one that I really like the one which is flattest, so I am going to stick with that for a while and see how it goes. I can certainly touch type on the K2 really quickly, which is nice.

But on the flip side of that, I doubt I would be able to bludgeon a zombie to death with the Keychron, and I am certain I could do that with the Das Keyboard.

What I've been writing

• Santa’s little helper,a piece of flash fiction about someone who may or may not be something of a trickster god.
• About 2000 words of the Alice and God story, which I have decided really needs a bit of work on its outline and structure. I mean some serious surgery – the plot as is just isn’t hanging together and it’s lacking pace. Some work required.
• A couple of other very short pieces, one called Death to Humans! and a second one which is a bit of a cliched story about paintings, which I should just polish up and get out there.

What I've been reading and watching

This week hasn’t been much of a reading week, which is my own fault. I often find that after finishing a book I’m at a bit of loss to what to read next, so I have to dive in and make myself read something – anything – until it sticks. I’m about a quarter of the way through Gareth Powell’s About Writing, which is an enjoyable little book about, erm, writing. Did I mention it’s short? I like short books.

This week has mostly been a cavalcade of getting things sorted in my little office. I finally decided that it was time to get a new chair. The one I have been working in for the past couple of years was really only intended to be the kind of thing you sit in for an hour at a time, reading and writing the odd letter. It looks lovely but when your life is basically one long Teams call it’s not that comfortable.

So I now have a decent but somewhat ugly chair which lets me sit more comfortably, and which I can lean back in (maybe for a small snooze?). On Tuesday a new filing cabinet will arrive which will let me get rid of the ridiculous amount of paper that I’ve got lurking around. And next weekend I am going to spend some time clearing out, vacuuming and generally turning my office space from a bit of a tip to something that’s much more enjoyable to sit in a work.

I have even got myself a new wastepaper bin. Never let it be said that I don’t live a rock and roll life.

I’m still futzing around trying to decide what the optimum keyboard is though. There are two options: the Das Keyboard (built like a tank, sounds like something from the 1970s, wired) and the Keychron K2 (smaller, neater, Bluetooth or wired, probably couldn’t be used to bludgeon a burger to death as you could with the Das Keyboard). Both of them use the same kind of switches, although the feel is a bit different thanks to the difference in housing and size. The K2 has some clear advantages: I prefer the feel of it a little, it can be set up at several different angles and it’s a little less like listening to an exchange of machine gun fire. Both are really good keyboards. The K2 is also backlit which can be useful in some circumstances.

Part of rearranging my desk space has involved moving the Mac mini from its normal place beside the display to underneath a screen riser. The riser is just big enough to also house an Apple external DVD drive (I am gradually ripping a load of music which is still on CDs) and the CalDigit Thunderbolt dock, which was one of the best purchases I made.

The Mac mini is one of the loveliest Macs I have owned. It’s the base level M1 version, with just 8Gb of memory and a paltry 256Gb of storage, but it’s perfect for the kinds of things I do with it. Most of my files are synced to the cloud anyway, so my actual storage needs are a lot lower than they would be with some other machines. It’s absolutely silent and the M1 is surprisingly powerful not just at the day-to-day tasks of work but also occasional video and audio editing. Sure, if you are spending your entire life editing videos you probably want more memory, but for me? Nope. 8Gb turns out to be just right.

Did I mention it’s silent? I love that.

What I've been writing

This week I have mostly been working on the Alice and God story which I started on a while ago. It’s been going well: I have worked on it every day and although I haven’t been writing a lot I’ve been writing regularly and that’s the most important thing.

What I've been reading and watching

This week I finished The Organised Writer by Antony Johnston. It’s a short book which canters through getting yourself organised to write, covering everything from time management for writers to sorting out your invoices to setting up your home office environment. I think a lot of the advice is good for anyone who works creatively and it’s already bumped up my productivity quite a bit. Highly recommended.

This was quite a busy week for work, with many meetings and even a day in London at the new offices (the first time I have visited, and very nice). It was a little bit less of a week for other stuff, apart from reading and watching interesting things.

I think I have a trapped nerve in my back though, which isn’t going away and which is proving to be a bit of an issue as it limits the amount that I can easily walk and stand. The good news is it doesn’t affect cycling – different muscles, different posture – but at some point I have to talk to the doctor about it and probably get to an osteopath. I can tell its a trapped nerve and not muscle strain as, a while after it has kicked in, I get a numb feeling down the front of the thigh on the same side, which is where that set of nerves heads to. The pleasures of getting old.

What I’ve been writing

To be honest I have done more farting around with technology than I have done writing. Something I have to fix in the coming few weeks. I have ideas, but ideas are ten a sodding penny.

What I’ve been watching and reading

This week I dived headlong into watching The Rig on Amazon Prime and it is fair to describe it as poor. Some of the acting was good – Iain Glen and Owen Teale are proper pros – but the plot had so many holes in it it looked like a pure wool jumper in a house full of clothes moths. The CGI was second-rate, despite apparently being quite expensive, probably because every external shot from the rig and of the rig was CGI. It ends on a cliffhanger that’s obviously a desperate attempt to drum up enough interest to make a second series viable, but without ever really making the characters believable enough to care about them. When a writer throws in the Hail Mary pass of making a character pregnant about two-thirds of the way through the series, you know it has reached the point where no one cares about these characters, and they are just throwing the kitchen sink at the page.

My bad reading habit of putting aside one book and starting another (often something I have read before) reappeared this week, when I temporarily dropped Becky Chambers’ A Closed and Common Orbit in favour of picking up M John Harrison’s short story collection Settling the World. The good bit about short story collections is that I race through them quickly. The bad bit is they are like getting all my calories from sugar. Although, to be fair to me, Harrison’s shorts aren’t always easy meat: a story about how embedding an axe into your face becomes fashionable is… well, weird.

The biggest “watch” of the week is Empire of Light, Sam Mendes’ new film, which would be a shoo-in for the Best Picture Oscar in another year. However, because St Steven of Spielberg has released a film which is not only semi-biographical but a love letter to making movies, he will win, and everything else will get consolation prizes.

In this case, those consolation prizes should include a bunch of technical Oscars – the lighting is amazing – as well as Olivia Coleman getting a second one, Micheal Ward getting at least a nomination for best actor, and you can take your pick of Toby Jones and Colin Firth for best supporting actor. Everyone in the supporting cast is excellent. A little shout out to Tom Brooke, who you might recognise from his role in Preacher and who turns in a lovely little performance full of kindness and light.

This is definitely cinema season, with both Tár and Enys Men coming up soon, plus More than Ever. Lots to see.

This was the first week back at work since the middle of December, so it was a bit of a shock to the system. Good to see everyone I work with, though.

The good news was that my MacBook Pro was brought back from the dead by our local independent Apple dealer. It had been dead for several months after a failed update to Ventura (thanks largely to our poxy broadband), which led to a strange “cryptographic error” happening every time it tried to update anything. I assume this was down to the disk encryption going wonky, but I decided to nuke the whole thing from orbit (it’s the only way to be sure) and reinstall Monterey, then make a fresh attempt to update.

Of course, that update failed too. So I tried wiping the whole disk and promptly lost the ability to see it, even via Target Disk Mode. Once I had tried using Apple Configurator to fix it — the last option available — and that had failed, it was time to bring in the experts. And a day later, I had a working, upgraded, very blank MacBook Pro.

It’s been good to get back to using a Mac laptop after quite a while when I didn’t really have one (my old MacBook Air is also in need of a wipe and install), using Mac-native tools like Ulysses rather than cross-platform ones. And the Pro has a 16in screen, which feels much less cramped than the 14in one on my ThinkPad. Even though it’s the last generation of Intel Macs, it’s still an excellent machine with a few years of life left in it.

Writing

This has been a bit of a frustrating writing week. I reached an impasse with the Alice and God story, which I started before Christmas because I had done a rough outline of the plot but reached the point where I needed to flesh it out a bit more - and I was trying to write my way through it instead. That doesn't really work for me: I either need to know nothing about what's going on (in which case I discover it through writing) or have a reasonably solid idea of what a scene is supposed to do in the plot (in which case I can give it some direction). So back to the plotting board!

And because I love tinkering around with tools, I will start using Ulysses again rather than Scrivener. Don’t get me wrong — Scrivener is an excellent application for putting together anything long-form — but I think it’s a bit fussy, and I like the idea of having all my writing in one place. At the moment, it’s split between Ulysses and Obsidian (blog posts and short-form) and Scrivener (long-form), and it’s not quite gelling for me.

Reading and watching

Also, a quiet week for reading: I restocked the unread books stack with a few items.

When the first day of a year falls on a Sunday, I suspect it's a good idea to look back on the previous year. A yearnote, if you will.

I could look back at the year's posts and pick out highlights, but as it's about a year, I think it's better to look at the key themes that defined 2022. Obviously, these are things I can talk about -- so there's nothing about work here -- and I've chosen to look at the positives rather than the negatives, which I will save for my journal.

With that context, the year has three themes: rediscovering writing, focusing more on my health, and reading. A lot of reading.

Rediscovering writing

I've been a journalist for (as of two days from now) 28 years. That seems fantastical to me as I still think of myself as the new kid on the block. This year forced me to accept that wasn't true, and I realised that what I do now in journalism is managing, mentoring and advising. I don't really write much.

And one thing that's been consistent throughout my career and life is that I love writing. I got a typewriter as a teenager because I liked writing stories which turned into Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, and my handwriting was… not great (it still isn't). I learned to touch type at 16 at further education college because you had to do a Wednesday afternoon activity, and sport bored me. After that, I was a student and wrote, and then I was a journalist and wrote. So writing has always been there.

I needed an outlet for my writing. And importantly, I didn't want to just do more blogging about technology. One thing I hadn't done was a lot of creative writing because I've always believed I don't have the imagination to make stories up. So I decided I wanted to give it a go.

First, I took a small weekly course based in a pub with a lovely writing tutor and a friendly group of people. I can't think of a better introduction to creative writing than doing it in a summer pub's garden, and we have continued meeting since.

That led to doing a five-day fiction introduction down at Arvon in Totleigh Barton. Tutored by the wonderful pairing of Charlene Teo and Michael Donkor, it was enormous fun and super-helpful in terms of my writing. But, most importantly, I think I found my voice: I had been writing how I felt I should note, and now I write how I want to write. And again, our group has stayed in touch. I don't think I had realised quite how social writing can be.

One of the lovely moments was talking through a story idea I had been working on with Michael, which I had always envisaged as a short story. I had struggled a lot with it because I had to write short -- and Michael said, "this isn't a short story. It sounds like a novel to me". I had always veered away from writing a novel, and it started me thinking about why. I realised two things: first, that I lacked the confidence to complete it, and second, that I have so many friends who have written novels that I think I've been intimidated by the idea. Michael helped me get over that, and if I ever finish a book, it will be down to the help and encouragement they gave me.

Focusing on my health

The big revelation about my health this year was that post-COVID, I need to take regular care of myself. Getting COVID the first time coincided with increased blood pressure and, because of less activity, putting on weight. Going from 10,000 plus steps per day when I was in the office to less than 5,000 working from home was always going to have an impact.

But this year, I started making some positive steps. For the first time in my life, I've been a regular attendee at our local GP for everything from booster vaccinations to blood tests to check that I'm not developing anything more serious. I've started taking medication to reduce my blood pressure (now at a decent level), and I've been looking after my vision with more regular check-ups at the opticians.

In 2023 this will continue as I develop more healthy eating and exercise habits, where simple changes will make a lot more difference.

Doing more reading

I was pretty surprised to find that I read 27 books in 2022. That's the most I had read since the internet happened when all my reading shifted to computers. And it's also been a wide range of books, not just trash science fiction (there's been some good science fiction).

I'm really pleased with this. Reading and writing go hand in hand. The biggest thing you can do to improve your writing is to read more. So it's probably not surprising that rediscovering my love of writing has also prompted much reading.

What's also helped is using a new Kindle, the Scribe. I have always wanted a bigger Kindle. While the Paperwhite I have is excellent, it's always felt just a little too small. And being able to write on the Scribe with little notes is also a fun way to add commentary, even if the comments don't show up in my Readwise notes. It's always interesting to me how a shift in a device can also shift your interest in a process.