Just a few personal bits and pieces today. Hey, everybody does it.
After handing in my thesis a few weeks ago I've been carefully reacquainting myself with the forgotten art of slobbing. It's a hobby that can take a lifetime to master, with almost infinite variation -- sleeping late, watching Cowboy Bebop, playing on the Xbox, surfing weblogs, or constructing voodoo dolls of Andrew Orlowski out of balled up paper and elastic bands. After a run of months of back-breaking productivity, I'm well out of practice, but feelings of apathy and neglect have begun to ebb back into my consciousness once again, and my muscles have started to atrophy. Within a few months I hope to have rid myself of the last remaining traces of motivation and energy.
My second official NaNoWriMo attempt never even got off the ground. I know that technically the competition can still be attempted and even won, but there's little point in trying because I have stuff coming up in the latter half of the month that is sure to keep me occupied at the expense of all other endeavours. Call it thesis burnout, call it a scarcity of ideas, or call it laziness, but for whatever reason, this month really wasn't the right time to try to write a novel. You may now begin calling me vicious names.
Remember that secret project I mentioned a few months ago? The work proceeds apace once more (good word, 'apace'). It's still not ready to unveil, and I particularly don't want the search engines to start spidering it until it's a little more complete -- I don't want visitors to think it sucks when really it's simply not ready. But it should be an interesting project. It's going to require some investment of time on my part, possibly so much that I'll be looking for someone else who can help me run it. But more on that when the time comes. (I'm not trying to be cryptic, honest... it's just that I'm still trying to work out the vocabulary to describe the project. I know what it's going to be, in rough terms, but I'm still refining the concept.)
Lunchtime. Gotta go.
(P.S. I'm not really lapsed, I just liked the sound of the words 'lapsed blogger'.)