OK, so it’s just me going on a summer holiday, but I got to sing the song in my head and that’s all that matters 😛

Once again it’s time for me to bid you all adieu for a little while. At least this time it’s not because I dying of some mysterious mojo-sapping lurgy

When I tell you that this is the first proper holiday I will have had since 2001, I hope you will appreciate how much I am relishing the prospect of two whole weeks where I don’t have to work, or study, or do anything other than things that amuse me. The first couple of days I am going back to the Homestead to spend time with the Triffid Tamer (my lovely Mum) then I am off to Guernsey for a week.

This all has the glorious side effect of making me internet-less for all of that time. Partly I have no choice in the matter: the places I am going have no internet access (the Homestead is still on dial-up and that is just too painful to count and who knows what the hotel has to offer). But even if the places I was going did have internet access, I wouldn’t use it. I want two weeks where I am not chained to my inbox, blog, and a gazillion other websites. I want two weeks of unhooked peace and quiet where I can wash the stress from my job out of my brain, unkink my back from the horrors of my office chair, and maybe even get some writing done.

Yes, writing. Not blog writing, not short story writing, but a full on, mulit-thousand-word book/novel/fiction-piece which I have had brewing in my head for years now. I have had this entire world, sitting there, populated with people who want me to tell their stories, but I just haven’t had the umph to do anything more than write snippets and glimpses here and there. Finally I think I’ve got to the place where I’m capable of doing them justice on the page.

I at least owe it to them to try.

You see, I have this ambivalent attitude towards writing. I love it and do it constantly, even when it’s just in my head. At the same time it bugs me and haunts me. I need space and a relatively awake brain to write well. Writing whilst stressed I can just about manage after a fashion, but writing whilst exhausted I can’t. Work being what it is, I’ve been averaging 40 hour weeks for the past ten months, and they’ve all be frantic and stressed 40 hour weeks to boot. Yes, I know that it could be a lot worse and I’m not complaining. There is no way you could say I was bored in my job and that’s a wonderful thing to be able to say, but it does mean that when I get home I barely have the mental energy to make a cup of tea, boil some pasta and collapse in front of SG:1, let alone write the next great Sci-Fi/Fantasy trilogy. *

So I’m taking two weeks to go into full hermit mode – just me, (hopefully) good weather, a quiet beach, a pile of notebooks, and the PocketCalculator. At the end of it I want to have something approaching at least a first draft, but I’m not kidding myself. It’s been seven years to get this far, I don’t think two weeks is going to make that much difference. But it will be nice to give it a go.

Whilst I’m gone, things are understandably going to go a bit quiet around the place. I’ve asked Neko and Moose to keep an eye on things, rescue comments from moderation, kill the spam and things like that. They may guest-post, they may not. It depends if inspiration strikes them, though both have said they will do a Sunday Roast to keep things ticking over.

I do also thoroughly recommend that you keep an eye on Tumbleweeds as I will be twittering on occasion, and that compiles them all into a pretty, readable format.

I will be back in Meadow Towers and firmly jacked in to my virtual existence on the 31st of August.

Till then, Tally Ho, Pip Pip and Bob’s your uncle 🙂

Endnotes:
Don’t worry, it’s not a trilogy. I have this distaste for everything being in trilogies – just because it’s a genre book, it does NOT mean it has to fit into three, damn it!