Honey, I shrunk the header

Regular visitors may notice that my artwork is conspicuously absent from the header right now.

At the weekend, I thought it was about time for a change of view.

Loaded a new image.

Checked the results.

Checked own pulse after mild heart attack.

The picture was about half the size it should have been, sitting all lonely in a big brown background. It looked crap. I removed it and tried again. Same result. I decided maybe there was a problem with the image, so put back the old one. Still crap! Now I can't even get back to what I had before.

Went to the "report issues" link only to find that you can't actually report an issue to someone who cares. All you can do is bleat about it on a message board and hope someone will notice. Someone had already bleated about this problem. Several people, in fact. Well, I can take comfort from knowing that it's not my image that's the problem. Blogger has screwed something up somewhere.

Bad Blogger!

So, until they put right whatever they screwed up, my header is pictureless. For now I've added the image I wanted to use to the Words and pictures tab.

The floppiness of time

Is it only two weeks since I posted something about progress, and regaining some sort of control in my life?

It feels so much longer ago.

I get that a lot these days...thinking back to something that seems ages ago, and realising that it was only a matter of days.

So (before I get on with the point of this post) how's it going? Well, a cautious "so far so good". I do seem, by and large, to be getting on with things I choose to. I've certainly succeeded in limiting my online networking, as you can tell by the reduced frequency of posts and comments. Sometimes I don't even think about my blog for days on end. I do wonder, though, just how much of a good thing that is, because this is a great community to be part of.

But my thoughts two weeks ago seemed to have struck a chord, and many people are talking about how little time they have these days. Here we are, in the twenty-first century, all wired in and surrounded by labour-saving devices, and yet we seem to have less time than ever before.


These paradoxes (lack of time, and the mixed-up perception of time) prompted some thoughts about time itself. Here they are, utterly random and with no real structure...

Labour-saving devices aren't always labour-saving.

With all this technology around us, why do we seem to have so little time? Well, sometimes the technology is simply crap. We have dozens of computer systems at work. They can certainly speed up lots of tasks and convey vital information to where it needs to be, and keep track of things that would be laborious by hand. But we also have dozens of unconnected systems and invest huge amounts of time doing nothing more than keeping them fed, and passing information from one to another because they don't talk to each other gracefully.

And then, there are systems that are simply ill-conceived, that take more time to work than the work itself would have done. Grrr...

But sometimes you've just forgotten how it used to be.

Many years ago, in another life, bean-counting consultants were sniffing around my department on a mission to prove that we were an extravagant cost to the business.

Luckily, those were the days when there were still folks around who remembered life before computers, and were able to remind the bean counters of the armies of clerks who used to be needed to perform the most basic drudgery just to keep records straight. Now, a much slimmer and more expert workforce was delivering far superior customer service. If you only ever see the cost and effort of modern offices, you can easily forget the benefits that everyone now takes for granted. So a lot of systems have actually saved a lot of time, we just don't always recognise it.

Our expectations have changed, too. In the days when letters, reports, and essays had to be written out by hand, you spent all your time working out what you needed to say, and relatively little time actually saying it. Now, with all the glitzy tools available, you can easily spend ten times longer finding just the right font, tweaking the layout, adding graphics...

Then, there's the distractions of games and blogs and...focus!...where was I?

Do we really have less time than people elsewhen in history? In the rush of modern life, I ask myself how did they ever find the time to build the pyramids, or raise gothic cathedrals, all without the benefit of modern engineering? Well, I suggest that they worked long and hard and steadfastly. Bloody hard, in fact. The simple answer is that they didn't know what "free time" was.

So for us to complain about having no time these days is actually bunkum. We do have time, we just maybe don't always choose to use it wisely.

Then, of course, Parkinson's Law kicks in and soon finds new uses for all the time we manage to save.

Then we come to that other paradox...

why does a week never seem like a week?

Well, I think people like to think of time as some sort of absolute and unchanging flow. It's not.

No, I'm not going to go all Einstein on you with deep physics. This is simple psychology.

I've come to realise that, alongside the tick of the clock, the steady (ignoring relativity for now) objective time, there are several other kinds of time that are all in the mind.

First, there is our perceived time. How fast does time seem to pass as we experience it? That varies. You know how an hour of history class can drag on for a lifetime, while a fun-filled vacation passes all too quickly? I think we see the passage of time differently depending on how engaged we are with whatever's going on around us. There's no mystery. The more fun we're having, the faster we perceive time flying by. Ain't that a bitch!

But then there's our personal historical time. For me, this is affected by how many distinct memories we lay down between one moment and another. If you've been super-busy and done a lot of different things in a day, it will feel like a long day, no matter how quickly you perceived it passing at the time.

And here is the answer to that paradox, because these two times work independently of each other. So, if you are going through a fun and eventful day, it will seem to pass quickly (perceived time), but when you look back (historical time) the start of the day will seem a long time ago.

And, of course, the opposite is true. When your life is in a rut, time seems to drag. But all of a sudden you are wondering where the year has gone and it only feels like a blink of an eye.

And isn't that a sad thing to have happen to you? It's your life, after all. You only get one shot at it. So you owe it to yourself to be as engaged as you can be in your own life, before it's gone.

100 words

If anyone happens to be visiting from Elena Solodow's 100 words blogfest, my entry is starting to get buried under more recent posts so follow this link to save you scrolling down to unearth it.

More progress

Another little bit of progress to check off the list (I'm very much a lists person, by the way). The lanterns on the stern posts add some finishing detail to the pirate ship.

You can see I had a bit of sunshine to work in. In between showers. And I was working outside in t-shirt and shorts today, after we had snow earlier in the week. What a week of contrasts.

Ghosts of blogfests past

I can tell that life is getting back to normal again.

We are back to Mayhem Monday, and another world-famous Botanist curry is doing its hubble-bubble-toil-and-trouble thing on top of the stove.

But in between various kitchen-ey things I wanted to find time to share this.

I can't believe it's only three weeks since I took part in Jen and Melissa's Be Jolly By Golly blogfest. Follow link here to my post, which links back to the owners' blogs and all the other entrants.

We have actually used two of the recipe suggestions now. First off, the frozen cranberry ice cubes (sorry, I can't now find who suggested that) went a treat at Christmas in our celebration fizz.

Then yesterday, I dug out L'Aussie's toblerone cheesecake recipe. I decided the recipe looked simple enough even for me, but I only got as far as the base before Ali pitched in and carried on with the topping. Probably just as well. I deal with a lot of the savoury specialities, but Ali is the undisputed pastry chef and dessert queen.

We then had a tough time for the rest of the day defending the fruits of our labours from marauding fingers until after dinner.

So, let's ask our tasting panel what they thought of it...

Yep. I think that is two cheesy grins and one big thumbs up!

Progress

Life in the new year is slowly settling back to normal. Ali's parents made it safely back to the UK after an unfortunate delay in Paris, courtesy of bumbling Air France staff, the kids are back to school, and things are picking up again at work after weeks of blissful quiet.

I'm maintaining a determined optimism about retaining control and focus in my life, both at work and at home, and am looking forward to making progress on several fronts. To that end, I need to rein in social networking a bit, so blog posts and visits will likely be slightly sparser than last year.

I'm in the middle of a few weeks of intensive preparation and critiquing, as the first big chunk of Ghosts of Innocence goes through the wringer.

I've had lots of encouraging feedback overall, which is good, but also a couple of common themes in serious need of work. The main points are: connecting better with the main characters, and improving pacing/tension in some of the sections. After the intensive work I put into chapter one last summer I know this will be a long haul, but I also know it will be worth it. These points, so early on in the story, would be more than enough to discourage agents from reading further.

Once the submissions I've now queued up have made their way through the queue, I'm going to take a break from the critique queue to give me time to work through the feedback. Then it will be on to round two.

Meanwhile, there's still plenty to sort out on the pirate ship. I've added another tab up in the heading to track that project, which I'll update from time to time.

100 words

Here we are in January, typically a time when people announce resolutions or goals for the year, which I am not going to do because I don't believe in resolutions and I regard goals as double-edged swords, great for motivation when used at the right time and for the right reasons, but more often tyrants that turn pleasant tasks into chores, so instead I am posting my entry to Elena Solodow's 100 word blogfest, a sentence based on a key transition in Ghosts of Innocence, where Shayla completes the first part of her journey and embarks on the next.

The Vantist Temple at Hawflun is a revered holy site, a destination for pilgrims from all over the planet, which makes it an ideal place for Shayla Carver, master assassin hell bent on revenge for the destruction of her home world, to murder and assume the identity of a civil servant from the Provinces who is paying her religious devotions before taking up a prominent role in the Imperial hierarchy in the capital city, because the normally stringent Imperial security is unusually inattentive at Hawflun, being corrupt, superstitious, and fearful of upsetting such a powerful body as the Vantist Church.

The rules of the blogfest are to write a single sentence of 100 words (with a 5 word margin). I've done my best to nail the 100 words exactly, and to make it a proper, grammatically correct, sentence. If you're observant, you'll notice that, just for fun, the introductory paragraph is also a 100 word sentence.

Please visit Elena's blog here to see the other entries.