#oneaday Day 430: Poisonous fantasy

So I picked up Blade of the Poisoner last night, as offensive as the Kindle version's cover is to me, and started to read it. As predicted, it is pleasantly easy to read, and the fact that each chapter is less than five minutes "long" at the speed I read means that I suspect I'm probably going to power right through this in short order. As noted yesterday, though, that's no bad thing; sometimes it's nice just to read something that stimulates the imagination a bit without challenging the more "technical" parts of your brain too much.

I'm actually surprised how much of Blade of the Poisoner I'm remembering — and I don't necessarily mean the details of the story, I mean certain little turns of phrase that have, for one reason or another, stuck in my mind for many years, even without having touched this book for probably several decades at this point. There were a few in the first chapter alone: protagonist Jarral's hesitant question "Can we go and … look at the village?" after his village has been burned to the ground by the evil Prince Mephtik, and the description of the character Archer falling to the ground, "sudden blood staining her brown curls" after being lamped over the head with the butt of a crossbow. Neither of these are particularly remarkable pieces of writing, but they are, for some reason, apparently lodged in my long-term memory, and I'm sure they won't be the only ones.

Thinking about it, despite a longstanding interest in and appreciation for the genre, one thing I don't think I've ever really tried my hand at writing myself is straight-up fantasy. I've done sci-fi, I've done "real world with fantastical elements", I've done "gritty realism", but one thing I don't think I've ever done is create-your-own-world-with-its-own-rules fantasy. And, dipping into Blade of the Poisoner for the first time in a long while last night, I feel like that's something which might be fun. I'm still yet to do anything with my "Scratch Pad" creative writing site that I've set up, largely because I haven't really been struck with any sort of "inspiration" just yet. But I think this might be it: it might be time for me to have a go at fantasy, and see what happens.

Fantasy is interesting because it has a whole different set of considerations to other types of writing. By its very nature, you don't have to follow the "rules" of reality, but you are then faced with the challenge of ensuring your world is internally consistent. How does magic work, if it is present at all? What species call that world home, and how are you going to ensure none of them accidentally end up as thinly veiled racial stereotypes? What social structures are in place? How do you strike a balance between giving the baddies threatening-sounding names and ensuring they don't end up sounding like medical terminology? Is there any connection between that world and ours? Is that world an "alternate Earth", or is it a completely different planet, perhaps with its own rules?

Lots of things to consider, and establishing a setting in this way can, at times, be a really fun part of writing. It is also an easy part to get very bogged down in, so one has to find a good balance between making notes on things that are important to the story you want to tell and the setting in which you want to convey that story, and not getting carried away writing what effectively amounts to a Dungeons and Dragons sourcebook. Of course, there's also a certain amount of value in fleshing out your setting to a ridiculous degree, because that can lay the foundations for future stories you might want to tell in that setting, but one shouldn't lose sight of one's main goal. As with any type of creative project, particularly if one hasn't indulged in such things for a while, it pays to start small and see where things go from there.

So yes. I am thinking. Hard. I can't promise if and when anything will appear over on the Scratch Pad, but I'll be sure to link it here when something does. And in the meantime, perhaps just a chapter or two more of Blade of the Poisoner, you know, as inspiration…

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 420: Scratch pad

Well, I did what I said yesterday and set up a new site purely for creative writing shenanigans. You can find it at https://scratchpad.moegamer.net — there's nothing there yet, but feel free to bookmark or subscribe or whatever if you feel like it. I'm making no promises as to the regularity with which I'll post over there, but it is there for me to use when I feel like it. Long-term, I might like to try and make some sort of "commitment" to doing some creative writing on a regular basis, but as with anything, it's going to be a case of establishing the habit first of all before you can actually really make it into a full-on habit.

I've been thinking about what I might want to write over there. I think I might start with some short stories rather than attempting to do anything too complicated or ambitious right away. While complicated, ambitious stories are always a delight to get started on, it's easy to get bogged down in the middle section and never get around to finishing them. One thing I found with my "NaNoWriMo But Not Really (Especially Now They're AI Weirdoes)" posts on this site was that it was those middle parts which were the most challenging. You may have a strong opening (ooer missus) and a solid finale in mind, but it's getting from one to the other that is often the challenging bit. Particularly when you're trying to ensure you meet a word (or, in the case of those projects, post) count.

So short stories would seem to be a sensible thing to start with. I can perhaps use them to explore or establish some characters, and those characters can perhaps grow into something I want to do more ambitious things with. Perhaps a collection of short stories focused on a particular character or group of characters is a solid foundation for a longer work? Or perhaps what begins as unconnected short stories can end up telling a complete narrative? I don't know. It's been quite a long time since I've done this, so my mind is, frankly, fairly awash with possibilities at the moment.

One thing I am going to take care of on the new site is to ensure that things are categorised nicely. I'm envisioning a page where you can just browse through short stories, then anything which ends up being more ambitious can, of course, have its own page also so anyone who cares to do such a thing can read from the beginning to the end without interruption. And it goes without saying that this site will remain ad-free for the foreseeable future — given that I don't have any ads on my most successful site, MoeGamer, I really don't think having them on a creative scratch pad is really going to achieve anything.

And, of course, the site will remain proudly AI-free. Not a single bit of generative AI will go anywhere near that page, and absolutely definitely not for text generation. The whole point of the site is for me to indulge in some unadulterated creativity for the first time in quite a while, so dicking around with AI kind of defeats the object there, doesn't it? Also there's plenty of quite convincing evidence right now that using ChatGPT turns you into a dribbling cunt that is totally incapable of thinking for itself, so there's that, also.

Anyway, yeah. That's the announcement, I guess. Now to figure out something to write over there!

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#oneaday Day 419: I wanna write a story

It's been far too long since I actually did some proper, honest to goodness creative writing that isn't burbling stream of consciousness blog posts or video game analysis, and I have to admit, I've been feeling an increasing hunger to just write something recently.

But what? I don't really know. There are lots of possibilities in my head, ranging from simple slice-of-life affairs to ambitious sci-fi epics — plus, of course, the Dreamwalker story I've had in my head since a teen but never quite got around to figuring out how it would finish, particularly as it started life as a Klik 'n' Play game — and I think it would probably be fun to write a murder mystery, given how many of them I've been watching of late.

I am beset with the odd mind goblin*, though. I feel like I can't write a murder mystery because I can't think through a crime logically enough to make it convincing — although honestly, with some of the absolute nonsense they get up to on Death in Paradise, I feel like particularly elaborate, bafflingly complicated murders are perfectly fine in the genre.

I feel like I can't write slice-of-life because it would either be too boring, or too unconvincing, or come across too much like wish fulfilment — although, again, thinking about the slice-of-life anime and TV shows I've enjoyed over the years, none of those things are necessarily a problem.

I feel like I can't write sci-fi because I don't know enough science to make it convincing — although, again, if you lean hard on the science fantasy angle you don't necessarily have to worry about.

Mostly, my biggest mind goblin, though, is the big question: who would read it? And its closely related question, does that matter? No-one reads this fucking blog and I'm still tapping away every night, so surely if I'm taking some time on the semi-regular to write some fiction and I feel satisfied with what I've achieved, that should be enough, no?

I think that's probably the case. So I think I'm going to figure out what I might want to write, then set up a place where I can post it easily — likely another blog, separate from both this and MoeGamer. And then all I have to do is write, whenever I feel like it. And who knows? Maybe something will come of it in the long term.

^{*Mind goblin deez nuts? Yes, I got you good. Don't try and pretend like I didn't.}

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#oneaday Day 395: A place for authors

One thing I've found myself wondering about a fair bit of late is whether the world still has a place for authors. By that, I mean people who primarily write books as their main contribution to existence; people whose job it is to write things that are, by their very nature, more long-form than your average 500-word Internet article.

Because, you know, I'm a little concerned. I'm a little concerned that a lot of people simply don't seem to have the mental capacity to digest anything written that is more than 250-500 words these days. Worse, there are people out there who genuinely believe that getting ChatGPT to "summarise" books for you is the same as "reading" them.

Part of me wants to write a book, or perhaps more accurately, multiple books, both fiction and non-fiction. I've always wanted to do this, and to my shame I've never pursued it to any particular degree, when I probably should. But these days I find myself wondering if I haven't left it too late. Is anyone even reading books any more? If I were to write a complete book that was all me, conjured up from the depths of my imagination, would anyone even believe that it wasn't AI-generated these days?

There's also the question of what to write about. There are numerous things I've started writing over the years, but only a few I've actually finished. Some of them you can read on this blog; one I even turned into an actual, physical self-published book. But that big question always hangs over my head: would anyone give a shit? Would anyone care enough to read it? Does that even matter?

Well, of course it matters to a certain degree. Writing a book is a significant amount of work, and putting all that effort in only for no-one to actually read it is… a suboptimal outcome, to say the least. And the trouble is, I feel, that the longer I leave it, the more likely that suboptimal outcome is to come true. The fewer people will be reading books. The fewer people will ever care about me, a nobody in the grand scheme of things, having found some means of expressing my creativity.

I've just been back and had a rummage through my "Creative Writing" folder that I have on my Google Drive. There's a few things in there that are the start of a good idea. Perhaps I should develop some of those. Perhaps I should try and start something completely new. Perhaps I should try and actually finish the story I've had half-complete in my mind since the age of about 15.

Or perhaps I should just accept the world as it apparently is today, recognise that I have maybe left it too late, and attempt to content myself with the other creative things I do.

I dunno. That last one doesn't feel altogether satisfactory. I still clearly have some thinking to do in this regard, it seems.

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#oneaday Day 333: Scribus Interruptus

Yes, I know that's almost certainly not correct Latin. No, I don't care. I just wanted a post title that wasn't just "catching up" again, because I missed yesterday and, as such, you are getting two loads of nonsense today instead of just one. Aren't you lucky?

The reason I forgot to write anything was because yesterday and today were my monthly trip down to the office, meaning last night I was staying in a hotel and, after having spent a long drive getting there, I doubt I would have felt like typing much of anything meaningful on my phone even if I had remembered to write something. But anyway, enough of that. You know by this point that my stays in hotels tend to result in short posts that either involve me talking about cop shows on TV or ranting about AI adverts I saw in between cop shows on TV.

Instead, today I want to call back to something I wrote about in the previous post: my previous creative writing projects. I actually went back and read the one I said I didn't remember writing or remember anything about. Turns out I did actually remember writing it and what at least some of it was about, though the exact details were actually something of a surprise to me come the conclusion. So I guess that did its job, or something.

I have decided to dub that particular work my name. for reasons that will be apparent to anyone who has read it. I actually rather enjoyed revisiting it, and while I think there's probably a bunch of work I could do to it before "publishing" it, I'm overall satisfied with it. Judging by the time I wrote it (November 2012), it was almost certainly as much a therapeutic exercise as anything else, and there are a lot of things about the main character's journey in particular that I can directly relate to my own experiences. I, unsurprisingly, do that in my own creative writing rather a lot; it's a means of processing the things I've felt and the things I've experienced, and by exploring them through another character, even if I'm writing from a first-person perspective, I can sort of take a step back and contemplate them from a slightly different angle.

One thing I do enjoy playing with when creative writing is perspective. I went through a phase of writing a lot of things in first-person present tense, and it's a style I still like very much. I forget exactly what inspired me to first do this, but I'm pretty sure it was something we were looking at in English Literature classes in school — likely something along the lines of Jane Eyre (which isn't first-person present, but is first-person) or its companion piece Wide Sargasso Sea (which introduced me to "stream-of-consciousness" narrative, a form I was also rather taken with, if that were not already very apparent.)

Out of curiosity, the other evening I happened to look up if there have been any novels written using second-person perspective — i.e. placing the reader in the role of the protagonist by narrating using the "you" pronoun. Of course, things like Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy automatically fall into this category, but no; I was thinking something more "conventional" and non-interactive.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover there are, in fact, several novels that have been written at least partially in this style. One that I found particularly intriguing was an Italian piece by Italo Calvino known as If on a winter's night a traveler. This novel is about you, the reader, attempting to read a novel named If on a winter's night a traveler and continually getting distracted. The story apparently jumps back and forth between what "you" are doing — which is the main plot — and the first chapter of a variety of other novels that, for one reason or another, keep distracting you. Supposedly the themes of the various novel extracts are weaved into the main narrative, and it all sounds very clever and, yes, post-modern. It may well be completely insufferable to read — and I'm not going to try until I've finished my Jane Eyre re-read that I started recently — but it definitely intrigued me, and made me think I might try something with second-person perspective at some point.

Anyway, I think that's probably enough for the first post of today. Please feel free to go and read my name. now I've given it a name, or indeed any of my other past creative writing pieces, which you can find in the menu bar at the top. I've even set it so they display in chronological order rather than the usual reverse chronological order — though WordPress' limitations mean that when you want to read the next page you have to press the "Older Posts" button rather than "Newer Posts". But I'm sure you can figure that out.

Enough! I have another post to write. So it's time to do that!

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#oneaday Day 332: From the brain to the page

I've been feeling kind of in the mood to do a bit of creative writing recently. I have not yet actually acted on this impulse, because I haven't yet decided what the optimal means of doing it is. Longtime readers may recall that I did not-NaNoWriMo (before NaNoWriMo became a dirty word) a few times on this very site, using my daily #oneaday posts to compose a story 1,000+ words or so at a time. If, for whatever reason, you're interested in reading those, you can find them with their first chapters starting at the following links:

Wasteland Diaries, a post-apocalyptic tale I inexplicably decided to write as someone who isn't the biggest fan of post-apocalyptic settings.
Untitled, a story I don't remember writing and can't remember anything about. I'm going to have to re-read this one, I think.
Special Measures, a novel about a teacher in a struggling school. (There's even an Actual Book version of this, though I did it through Blurb before I found out about their absurd shipping costs. You're welcome to buy a copy though.)
Unfinished, an unfinished project.

There are also a few other bits and pieces here and there, such as an extremely short-lived "collection" of two short stories about a school (number 1 here, number 2 here), and another extremely short-lived collection of short stories based around the themes of "beginnings and endings" starting here. And probably some other stuff I've forgotten. Like this!

I think I just want to "write a story" again. It's something that used to bring me great joy when I was younger, particularly when I was at school — I was notorious among my English teachers for creative writing projects that were several orders of magnitude longer than anyone else in my cohort — and I feel like it's one of those things that is probably good "therapy" of sorts, too.

The thing I'm umming and ahhing over is whether I should start a new site specifically for the creative writing stuff, or if I should just do what I've done previously and host it here. My concern if I host it here is that I'll lose it, or forget about it, such as what has apparently happened with Untitled, above. But then at the same time it's nice to dive back into the archives sometimes and stumble across something like that. So perhaps I will just host it here, and maybe make a bit more of an effort with the menus to make accessing things like those past stories a bit more straightforward.

Okay, then it's settled. Maybe. I will start Writing Stories again. Whether these stories will form part of my #oneaday efforts or be something completely separate I haven't yet decided. But creativity will happen. Oh yes, it will happen. You just wait. And without even a whiff of generative AI bullshit, because generative AI, particularly anyone attempting to make out that using it is somehow "creative", can eat my entire ass.

Now to ponder what I might want to write about, I guess!

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The Cat and the Human.

She had loved that cat. Adored her. At times I'd even joked that she loved her more than me. I knew that wasn't the case, of course, but it seemed like the feeling between her and the cat was mutual.

I didn't mind for the most part, of course. I loved the cat, too, and I always appreciated any time she came and sat in the chair in my office while I was working. I knew that her priority was sitting somewhere comfortable and warm rather than necessarily enjoying my company, but it was nice to feel like she wanted to be in the same room as me now and again.

Now her real master was gone, though, and she was left with just me, forever second-best. I could see the sadness in her eyes. I could see it in the dejected-looking way that she sat on her cat tree. I could see it in the way that she just didn't seem to have the energy she once did.

The cat's obvious sadness made me feel miserable, too. It was an uncomfortable reminder of past times of joy, never to be repeated. Once we had been a family of sorts, always together, always sharing in the wonders of life. Now we were just a man and his cat.

And yet, at some point, I don't know when… we bonded more than we ever had done. Our shared grief brought us together. Just as I recognised how the cat was suffering from her absence, so too did the cat recognise that it had hit me hard, too. And slowly, little by little, completely wordlessly, our relationship began to change.

I remember the first night it happened. I was lying in the bed which now felt entirely too large for me, tossing and turning, struggling to get to sleep. Suddenly, I felt something; a weight on the bed. And I heard something: a soft purring. In the dark, I could just make out the shape of the cat. She had come to see me in the night; she never used to do this, usually preferring to sleep in her comfy cat bed downstairs in the living room.

But now she was here, purring softly in my ear. She headbutted my outstretched hand until I began to pet her, and she rubbed her face on my hand as I tickled her cheeks and chin.

Then, she sat down. It was a decisive move, a declaration. She managed to mould herself so that she fit perfectly into the curve of my arm that was extended across the empty half of the bed, and quickly curled up, ready to fall asleep. Her soft fur felt good against my arm, and I felt a sense of relaxation wash over me — a feeling that I hadn't really been able to enjoy for some time now.

From thereon, I had that feeling every night. Things were going to be all right, in their own strange way.

She loved me, too. This cat loved me. Perhaps it had taken our shared loss for her to really feel like she could show it, but I was left in no doubt whatsoever.

Neither of us wanted to be alone. And now, neither of us would be alone.

Please do not worry about me, everything is fine and this is not an autobiographical blog post! The above is a piece of creative writing following the prompt "A human and a cat who come to some sort of mutual understanding."

2471: Memoirs of an Ordinary Person

I've been listening to some audiobooks while I've been working the past few days. I've just finished Dave Gorman's Too Much Information — a work that resonated all too well with me, given my growing frustration with the cacophonous "noise" of everyday life — and have since started on Sue Perkins' Spectacles, her memoir.

One thing I've often wondered over the years is whether or not there's any perceived value in the memoirs of "ordinary people" — in other words, memoirs written by people who aren't celebrities, or even those who haven't had anything seemingly noteworthy happen to them. And I'm inclined to think that there is — after all, the best celebrity memoirs are the ones that talk not about being a celebrity, but about their childhood, or formative experiences growing up, or things that they've experienced that helped make them the person they are today. Things that are relatable to the audience; things that are relatable to "normal" people.

There's value in having a celebrity name attached, of course: someone who enjoys Sue Perkins' TV and radio appearances is likely to pick up her memoir simply because they like her, for example. But this doesn't mean her life story is inherently more valuable than anyone else's. In fact, I'd wager a guess that there are lots of people out there who have had lives far more interesting than today's celebrities have.

In my experience, whether or not the person whose life you are reading about is famous or not is largely irrelevant; what does, on the other hand, matter is whether or not they have interesting stories to tell.

And, well, I don’t like to blow my own trumpet too much, but I do feel I have more than a few interesting stories to tell. My life has certainly been eventful, if nothing else. This blog has occasionally dipped into memoir-esque territory, but as an idle side project, I've started writing down some of the things I remember from my past.

I am a normal human being. Well, as normal as anyone is these days, which is to say I’m riddled with neuroses, suffer from depression, anxiety and social anxiety—two very different, but related things.

I digress; I am a relatively normal human being. I haven’t survived some sort of unimaginable tragedy, I haven’t had to cope with a life-threatening illness or the challenges of a physical disability and the nearest I’ve come to being involved with a famous person is working in an Apple Store at the time John Cleese came in with a black credit card, proclaiming that it could “sink a bloody battleship”. I didn’t serve him, I was just there; that’s how much of a relatively normal human being I am.

Nonetheless, Things have happened to me, much as they have doubtless happened to you, your friends and the rest of your family. These Things may not have seemed like a big deal at the time, but if you’re anything like me, you’ll have found that the strangest things stick in your memories for many years, and it seems like quite a shame to run the risk of them, at some point, being filtered out of your mind in favour of some new and ultimately useless piece of information you picked up from Wikipedia. We live in an age full of constant noise, after all, with every piece of media around us vying for our attention and threatening to fill our minds with useless dribble that might get you lots of Likes on Facebook, but which doesn’t really compare to the fond memories of your childhood.

My memories aren’t all fond. Some of them are downright painful or embarrassing, and some of them, to this day, still make me feel overwhelmingly negative emotions such as anger or grief. It’s healthy to share such memories, though; otherwise, they just get bottled up inside, and, over time, you run the risk of them overflowing and forcing you to, I don’t know, run naked through a shopping centre with a chainsaw in each hand singing Stairway to Heaven. Or, you know, something.

With all that in mind, then, writing them down in some form seems like a reasonable idea.

2449: Planning Ahead

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With it being October now, I find myself pondering whether to do some creative writing this coming November as I have done for the last few years. And I think I'm going to, only this time try something a bit different.

I've been meaning to check out the well-known interactive fiction creation software Twine for quite some time now, and this November feels like an ideal opportunity to do so. I've been having a little fiddle with it this evening in an attempt to get to grips with the basics, and I think I now know enough to be able to put together a convincing interactive story over the course of a month.

For the unfamiliar, Twine is an open-source piece of software that allows you to create primarily text-based games with hyperlinks as a means of interaction. In simple terms, it allows you to create Choose Your Own Adventure-style experiences, though with a bit of scripting knowledge and/or making use of the macros available in the various story templates, you can create somewhat more complex affairs with conditional branches, variables and all manner of other goodies.

Perhaps the most appealing aspect of the software for me is the fact that it's entirely text-based and consequently carries no need for you to be good at graphics or sound design — and no risk of people accusing you of being "lazy" for relying on predefined assets. Everything in a Twine game is a collaboration between the author's skill at writing and the player's own imagination. (It is possible to add graphics, sound and music to Twine games for those who see fit, but doing so feels a bit like you're missing the point somewhat.)

Another really nice aspect of Twine is the fact that it depicts your story as a flowchart, automatically creating new branches according to the choices you offer throughout. This makes it very easy to visualise the overall flow of your story and branch it off into different routes if desired; likewise, it allows you to bring divergent paths back together pretty easily.

I need to have a think about what sort of story I want to write and how it might be interactive — the latter being a consideration that you don't have to think about when writing linear traditional fiction! Still, I've read plenty of visual novels for "inspiration" over the years, so hopefully it won't be too difficult to come up with something; going by my previous experiences, however, the true challenge will be keeping the scale of the project in check so I don't get too overambitious and start attempting to produce something that will never be finished in a month of development!

I'll continue experimenting in Twine in the run up to November so hopefully by the time November rolls around I'll be proficient enough in the software to produce something convincing. And then, of course, the final product will be playable by you, dear reader, should you so desire.

2221: Seeing the Final Product Forming

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I spent a chunk of time today porting the work I've already done on a story from Google Docs online to Scrivener on my Mac. Scrivener is a piece of software I picked up quite a while back and have used sporadically whenever I feel creative; it's a lovely piece of software to keep written projects of any size manageable and organised.

For the unfamiliar, Scrivener allows you to organise your whole project into a single file, including the chapters and sections/scenes of your book, research material, front matter and general notes. Within the file, you have a tree structure of folders and items, with numerous templates available for various types of project. When you're all done, you "compile" the project like a computer program, and Scrivener spits the finished product out in the format of your choice, be it double-spaced manuscript for sending to a publisher, attractively laid out pages ready for self-publishing, or various popular eBook formats. You can even export it to a word processor if you so desire, allowing you to format it further using tools beyond that which Scrivener offers.

I was surprised what a feeling of motivation I felt from porting the existing content over to Scrivener, and I attribute this primarily to the fact that what you bung into Scrivener looks remarkably like what the finished product will end up being. In fact, if you compile a project in progress to a PDF just to have a look at how things appear, it's even more motivating, because you can imagine holding the finished book in your hands. That's quite exciting.

Just the fact that Scrivener uses some very attractive, convincingly "book-like" default fonts helps with this feeling of seeing the final product coming together, though. Couple that with the fact that Scrivener's interface is designed to be as clean and distraction-free as possible, and all in all you have a piece of software that is eminently suitable for creative types to realise their written ambitions — even if you barely use a fraction of the functionality the software has to offer, which I suspect is a category I will probably fall into unless I want to get really anal about page headers or something.

Anyway. This is a long-winded way of saying that I have been successfully motivating myself to continue with my creative writing project while I still don't have any full time work. I'm under no illusions that I'll be able to make money from this — at least initially — but the story I'm working on at present is a passion project that it will simply be satisfying to see completed at last, and released into the wild. If anyone ends up actually buying it, so much the better, of course, but if nothing else completing a project of this sort will 1) show me that I can do it, and hopefully inspire me to do more that take less than 15 years to complete and 2) stop my mother telling me every so often that I should "write that book". (She hasn't done that for a while, to be fair, which probably means it's due a mention sometime soon… I know you're reading, Mum, so take this as assurance that I'm doing it.)

So that's that. Writer? Windows or OSX-equipped? Give Scrivener a go, and you might just be surprised how much you can get done.