'Concrete elephants', by me via Flickr

It is an amazingly sunny day today with hardly any wind. I’m not keen on days without wind but with lots of sunshine because the heat rises quite rapidly, making me feel sick. Nevertheless, the sunlight in general is very much welcome. It lets me take wonderful photographs like the one to the left.

It’s amazing to think that I am already on day 50 of the 365 Days of Photography challenge. I seems like I only started this a couple of weeks ago. It is also good to see that the challenge is serving its primary purpose; namely to help improve my photography skills.

I am now very much more aware of the weight of an image, how it is balance and what the overall composition is like. I think I have a better understanding of ISO settings, how colour affects the feel of an image, and the general points to look out for when setting up a shot.

Now if I could only remember to keep my fingers out of the way of the lens when I press the button to take a photograph, I will be very happy indeed! Keen-eyed readers will spot that today’s image is cropped slightly. Now you know why.

Jenny and I went sailing earlier this week (her blog about the day can be found here. I opted instead for a video). I have never sailed before but I am glad we went because it was amazing. We almost capsized shortly after setting off, thanks to a sudden and very powerful gust of wind, but I’m happy to say her sailing skills and my memory of windsurfing combined to save us. She let out the sails and did some other things while I leaned as far out of the boat as I could, shifting its centre of gravity as far over to the side that was coming out of the water as I could (which anyone who looks at some pictures of windsurfers will see happens quite a lot).

Although my feet froze and it was very difficult to thaw them out because of the high wind chilling them again (Raynaud’s is a horrible condition for anyone who fancies doing any kind of outdoor pursuit) I did eventually stop being an ice cube so we could go out again. It was even better the second time because I knew a little more about what I was supposed to be doing. Maybe next time I can try steering the boat; which would be fun.

I don’t know what has gone wrong with regard to the poetry challenge. I have four poems that have not appeared on the website, so I will have to sort that out later today. I am up to my eyeballs in work during the rest of today so I can’t get to it just now but rest assured, you will be exposed to more of my poems at some point!

Like the photography challenge, this April Poetry Month is a great way of developing skills. I am really enjoying it and it seems everyone else who is taking part is also enjoying it; which is fantastic. It doesn’t matter how good or bad you think your poems are, the point is that you are writing poetry and therefore developing your skills as a poet. That, to me, is a great thing.

Anyway, this is getting very long now. I should get back to work, otherwise I will end up working well into the night; which I don’t want to do. Tomorrow I’m drawing lots of comics for next week so we can get The Life of Nob T. Mouse and All over the house back on schedule. If all goes to plan, Ink Proof Cannon will be back on Monday too. If that happens, I will be thrilled. It has been on hiatus for too long!

See you later!

When it comes to getting work done, there are days when I feel like I can do no wrong. These are the days I live for as a writer. I put finger to keyboard and all the worlds fall out onto the screen in a display of sheer perfection.

Today is not one of those days. Today is a day where every word is a battle. Nothing is flowing. There is a dam in my head, blocking the torrent that leads to my successful completion of that task we call work. This last sentence, as purple as anything a sixth former may write in order to try to sound smart, is a fine example of the problems I am having today.

So I have been taking regular breaks from the keyboard. This helps me to relieve what would otherwise be pent-up frustration. I head into Second Life, because even though I don’t have games on my computers now I still need some way to take my mind off things, and decide to see if I can create a computer to work at within the metaverse.

This 'computer' is made up of two boxes and lets me browse the Internet, including watching YouTube

Success has been limited at this point. I have managed to succeed in creating a strange-looking computer. It is something that appears to have been cobbled together from a laptop computer screen and an Amstrad CPC 464 keyboard, because that’s pretty much what it is. The computer can browse the Internet well enough but when I tried to log in to this website to write this very blog post, it threw up an error and went into a sulk.

I am not therefore writing this on a computer that is being rendered by another computer; which was my original plan. I would dearly love for that to work but, alas, it seems that it cannot; at least not for the moment. Recursive computing will have to remain a dream for the time being.

I fully believe there will come a day when I can do all my work from a terminal inside Second Life (I do, after all, do most of my work from inside Google Chrome right now anyway) and I would not be surprised to find that day is not far off. It is not this day however, so it’s back to Chrome for me.

In other news, I am taking Monday off. I shall spend the day drawing comics for All over the house and The Life of Nob T. Mouse. I will then attempt to get Ink Proof Cannon back on track. I have the stories already worked out, at least in part, so all that is really to be done is the actual drawing of them. I estimate that this will take me about eight hours, give or take. It should be fun, too.

If there is any time left over, I will write the second half of the Webcomic Builder article on the use of the Rule of Three in writing, which was supposed to be up last Tuesday but which has been delayed thanks to the amount of time I had to spend sorting out the mortgage.

After that, it’s nose firmly back to the grindstone for me.

The Watermillock, in Bolton.

The weekend has been an interesting, even refreshing time. I feel like I got a reasonable amount of work done – not as much as I would have liked, but enough. I got to see friends as well, which was nice, and spent some time with them today, too. It’s nice when I get the chance to do that.

While my good friends were here today, we all went out to the Watermillock in Bolton. It’s a very nice place that serves very good food; which is why we were there. I’m pretty sure it’s a former stately home that is now a restaurant but Jenny tells me it was a nursing home in between those two states.

That seems to be the fate of some buildings: you are one thing, you become another thing, then you become something completely different. There is probably a philosophical point to be made in that. No doubt it’s one of those points you can put in a book of “thoughts to think while you sit on the loo”. It would be a bestseller, I am sure.

I also got to start bringing my comic projects back up to speed. Three of the four projects restarted today. The fourth will return next week. I want to pace myself and build back up to that one because it’s a big project and if I don’t handle it right, it will topple over again.

With regard to the three that came back today, All over the house returned from hiatus with a joke about the British National Anthem. I was a little nervous about doing this one because it involves the royal family and some people can be touchy about that but it seems to have gone down well. Maybe I just worry unduly?

The Life of Nob T. Mouse is coming to the end of a storyline that, once again, has run for far longer than I wanted it to. When it comes to storytelling on Nob Mouse, it seems I am doomed to repeat the same problems every time, namely the issue of accidentally stopping the comic mid way through a story. I never set out to create an intermission, it just happens. Please rest assured that I am working to prevent this in the future.

Finally, The Webcomic Builder is back from its lengthy stint in the doldrums. With the launch of How ‘N About, I really wanted to get my other informative websites back up and running. With any luck I can keep putting an article up on the Builder every day, Monday to Friday, and thereby get the information up there that I wanted to have available when I first started the project back in January last year.

If I can keep up the pace on the Builder, maybe I can get the UK Law Review running again in a week or two? That would be fantastic. But until then, I will plod on and try not to drop all the projects I’m dealing with right now.