Ok, look people. I don't know what I was thinking. 50,000 words? In 30 days? Yeah, that's not a problem. Except that I have a 12 week old baby in the house. Oh, and giant project going on at work, requiring an increasing amount of travel. And an departmental re-organizational thing, where I'm getting a new job with additional responsibilities. And banjo practice. And did I mention the 12 week old baby? I wrote just over 2,000 words the second day and realized that this was not going to work this year. So I'm giving it up before I really begin, which will hopefully allow me to retain some vestigal remnant of kidney function, given the amount of Diet Coke I drink when writing to a deadline. Oh well. There's always next year... Besides, I found another way to waste my time and make me the coolest dad on the block. Thanks to Think Geek's Helmet Action Cam, I can now mount a camera on my remote control plane. It's a pain to get off the ground given the extra mass and need to play with the plane's center of gravity, and after several weeks of very good flying, I'm back to heavy landings and duct tape repairs. But it allowed me to get this film (where you can see the farm we live on, and my neighbor's plane at one point, passing beneath mine - the blurry bit in the bottom of the screen is the propeller in action) Everything was going swell, I must say, until I tried one stunt to many with the camera... (note, I recovered the camera from the wreckage before snapping this photo, as I needed the SD card). I'll be placing another order to my buddies at Squadron Leader...

It's National Novel Writing Month time. I managed to write 325 words yesterday. I'm so screwed.

Gwyr wiped his palms across his tunic again, leaving the chill sweat on the already damp cloth. The water of the estuary was flat, the tide was low and the mud looked thick and grey in the dim light. The fog was only starting to clear up, lifting from the beach and letting a little bit of the morning sun start to peak through. The reeds and small crooked trees that poked up here and there amongst the tidal mud looked sullen and toxic. The trail he was standing on took a crooked path across those humps of firmer soil and along side of the stream of water that was flowing sluggishly out to sea. He could hear the small, lapping sounds of the waves at his back as he looked upstream where the trail disappeared behind a larger hummock of grass covered mud than most. Gwyr scuffed his boot at the dull saucer sized black scale lying in the dirt before him. A few more were now visible littering the trail. He patted the flank of the scrawny horse he had been issued two days before without looking at it, and looked down at the two strings in his hand that he pulled from the bottom of his rather empty purse. The light was good enough to distinguish the blue thread from the black. It was time. Sighing, he turned and made a final check on the line he had secured to the horse’s bridle. It would be a real annoyance to come back and find that it had wandered off. Even if it was nearly ready to be butchered and fed to the dogs, it still beat walking back to the city. He snorted to himself. Assuming he would make it back alive and in a state to remount his horse was remarkably optimistic. How the hell had I ever gotten myself into this mess in the first place, he wondered to himself.

Oh God... is it really that time of year again?

Hello! This is your imagination. I know work, school, and general craziness have been keeping us apart lately. But there's something we need to do together this November. It's called National Novel Writing Month. For it, we'll bash out a 50,000-word novel, from scratch, in 30 days. You and me. Writing a book. Together. I need you to sign us up. Because I don't have any arms. http://www.NaNoWriMo.org Love, Your imagination