So, November is over. And, fifty-thousand and some words later, I’ve managed to do it again. In the middle of Sunday afternoon, I wrote the last words of Homeopath, a somewhat odd tale of intrigue, rage, and maybe murder. But maybe not. In any case, it’s definitely written, and it’s definitely more than 50,000 words, and so I’ve won NaNoWriMo 2009. Go me.

This year, I’m not going to post the entire thing immediately. Instead, I’m going to have a break from it for a while, then revisit and edit it in a month or two. So, no novel in this post, I’m afraid. I can, however, tell you some thing’s I’ve learnt over the last month:

• Planning helps; I didn’t plan in any detail, and ended up wandering around for 25,000 words setting the scene before I got on with the plot.
• Writing in the first person gives me the urge to constantly point out that I don’t necessarily share the opinions of my protagonist. Make of that what you will.
• Emacs and MarkDown make for a pretty nice editing environment for prose. Isolator is also handy.

The main thing I’m intent on taking away from the experience, though, is getting back into the habit of actually doing something substantial - writing something, programming something, practising something - when I get home from work in the evening, as oppose to just collapsing in front of the TV. NaNoWriMo imposed a structure where this wasn’t an option. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to keep it up now that it’s finished.

Finally, two graphs (because graphs are traditional). This first graph shows my progress over the course of the month; basically, things went a bit pear-shaped early on, but I managed to make the time up over the subsequent weeks.

The second graph shows my daily writing rate; the red line marks 1,666 words per day, which is the average rate (more or less) than you need to keep up to make it to 50,000 within the month.

Fascinating, I’m sure you’ll agree.

In 2002, I signed up for NaNoWriMo, an insane Internet pseudo-contest to write a novel in a month. I managed it, and you can see the results here (be gentle - it was written in a month, and I haven’t revisited it with an editor’s pen). For a few years, I paid it no mind, but this year I seem to be surrounded by people who’re taking up the challenge, so I’ve succumb to peer pressure and signed up again. Wish me luck.

P.S. - For anyone who has an nascent novelistic idea (or even a title), and have, say, mentioned it in the pub, then it’s not too late to sign up. You know who you are.

P.P.S. - Regarding the previous entry, the bad news is that I’ll not have a chance to work on SilverService for at least a month. The good news is that I’ve already solved the new entry problem, which was the most serious issue with the current version. If you have the OS X developer tools, you can grab the latest version from GitHub to get the fix.

After bashing out a little HTML and CSS, and tweaking Apache config files a bit, www.rho.org.uk has a new front page, which points (amongst other places) here, so this site it now visible to the outside world. I’ve also created an archive of the previous (Blosxom-based) site on the off chance it’s of any use to anyone.

Now all I have to do is write some blog entries about something less tedious than configuring blogging software. Hmm…

Anyone who’s been paying attention to http://www.rho.org.uk (which is, to a first approximation, no-one) will have noticed that I’ve not updated it for over a year and a half. The short answer is lethargy; I just didn’t get round to it. For the long answer, read on. Previously, http://www.rho.org.uk was a single site running on Blosxom. In order to get the site looking how I want it to, I’d written a number of templates. And plugins. And hacked the script a bit. It all sort of worked, I enjoyed doing it, and I even appreciated the Perl practice. However, I decided to rearrange things such that entries were organised by date as opposed to category (see Cool URIs don’t change), and that’s when the problems started.

In theory, this shouldn’t be too difficult - Blosxom is, after all, a very flexible system, and can do this sort of thing - but to sort out all the details, and to make all my plugins and templates work in the new world, isn’t a ten-minute job. The effect was that every time I felt like writing some actual content for the site, I’d pick up the computer, and think “I need to sort out the script first”. I’d prod at it listlessly for half an hour, but without enthusiasm. After all, that wasn’t what I’d picked up the computer to do. I’d lose interest, and go and do something else. Last week, instead of starting to tweak the script, I checked the public version of the site. The last entry was from eighteen months ago.

I could have knuckled down, dived in, mixed metaphors and fixed the existing setup. However, that sounds a lot like hard work. What’s more, the problems probably wouldn’t stop there - the more I go off-piste with Blosxom, the bigger a rod I create for my own back. I realised that rho.org.uk is something I do for fun, and that what I really wanted was something that worked with the minimum of fuss. I’ve tried the DIY route, and I know I can do it. That doesn’t mean I want to. I want to be writing entries, not messing with Perl and Apache.

So, I decided to start from a clean slate. I’ll keep the old site around as an archive, but I’m not bothering to port the older entries en masse. I’m also separating my blog - (http://rob.rho.org.uk) from the main website (http://www.rho.org.uk), as that gives me more flexibility for any future changes, and means I don’t need to shoehorn pages that don’t make sense (such as the one for SilverService) in to a blog structure. Software-wise, I’m using Movable Type - I’ll post more about that later.

I also promise to post more frequently. Honest.