It feels like forever since I last wrote a blog post, let along a post that wasn’t about something specific. Blogging seems to have faded a little, not just for me but for a few friends of mine as well. Is the impulse to blog lessened? Has Twitter taken over, providing as it does immediate gratification? Or is it that blogging has always been the preserve of the under-occupied?
No idea, but I suspect it has something to do with having been for the last, oh, three years, absurdly busy and the fact that blogging is always the first against the wall when the revolution comes. First it was ORG, then is was wedding planning, then it was desperately trying to find work, then it was having so much work that I never had space to think. Finding an equilibrium has been quite tough, but I think that this year might see a turning point. Or at least, I hope it will.
The being busy for work thing has been great, especially after a painfully quiet year in 2009. But it has meant that I just haven’t had a moment to sit down and write for myself. Moments I have had have been spent either working on Argleton or collapsed in a heap in front of the telly (probably watching CSI, as there’s so much of it about at the moment.)
Talking of Argleton, whilst it’s taking me a huge amount of time, I am making good progress. You can get more detail over on Kickstarter, but in short, it’s been a bit of a learning curve where, by curve, I mean wall. It’s one thing having a vision of what you want to create, but quite another to actually get reality to match that vision. Writing the book was the easy bit – getting the design together and the printing and getting everything prepared for binding has been a bigger job than I had anticipated.
My first investigations into printing seemed to be going well until I had the book blocks back to test bind. The printer had suggested that we do a perfect bind, where the pages are glued together, rather than a booklet sewn in sections for the hard back. But when I finished up the hard back and opened it up, I discovered that the glue just wasn’t flexible enough, and pages started falling out almost immediately.
Work with my second printer is going much better, but we’re still ironing out some of the wrinkles, such as making sure that the papers we’re using are behaving the way we need them to. (Right now, the end papers are wrinkling when they are pasted down, so we need something a bit less absorbent.) There’s still a way to go, and my supporters are being wonderfully patient, but I am hoping that I will be able to make real headway in March and get everything finished up.
February is taken up by a work trip to India, from where I write this now in my hotel in Mumbai. Kevin’s here with me – we’re working together quite often now, which is fab. We arrived at lunch time, and I’m hoping that the jet lag isn’t too punishing because we have two solid weeks of work. I doubt I’ll be on Twitter much, and email will be sporadic, but nothing new there I guess.
