You would think that with two blogs, I might manage to keep at least one of them up to date, right? Wrong. I was so busy in the run-up to Christmas, I couldn't think of anything useful to say. I wasn't writing, and my conlang project was moving rather slowly. Then on December 22nd I hurt my back - bending down to get milk out of the fridge, for heaven's sake! - and couldn't sit up and use my laptop for a couple of days... Then Christmas arrived, and things got busy again, so here I am, with the New Year underway and over a fortnight gone since I last blogged.

I really only have one writing resolution for 2008 - to finish the second draft of "The Guiser". OK, so that was my resolution last year as well, but I had never revised a novel before and had no idea how hard it would be. I've learnt a lot in the past twelve months, so maybe this time I have a chance of actually doing it. The prospect of posting the same resolution for 2009 ought to be enough to motivate me :)

Following my resolution to hack on with revisions of "The Guiser", I have signed up for an online workshop "Using an Outline to Edit" and have begun listening to the ISBW podcast again. I've started the latter at Episode 78: Editing (what else) - it came out back in November, but of course I was Nanoing by then and editing was the last thing on my mind. I recommend this episode to anyone trying to edit a story or novel as, despite Mur's insistence that she hates editing and is no expert, she has some great tips. Nice one, Mur!

Thanks to those nice folks at Mindola, the last strings tying me to Windows on the Samsung Q1U have been cut. They gave me a link to the raw JAR file for SuperNotecard, which means I can run it on Linux :D

I've tried it out on my Debian box at work and everything seems OK, so I shall definitely be pushing ahead with my plan to convert the Samsung to dual-booting XP and Ubuntu. I'd rather not blow Windows away entirely at this stage, since it still has one or two advantages, such as handwriting recognition and better hardware support, but at least I can now get serious writing work done without it!

After a week of research and trial'n'error, I've finally finished installing Ubuntu on the Samsung. It's still not perfect - the processor runs a bit hot, which reduces battery life - but I have all the functionality I need for a mobile editing machine. I've written an installation tutorial and a review article, the latter for TabletPCReview.com.

I'm back at last from my writing holiday in Cornwall, with mixed reactions. On the plus side, the cottage was lovely and I did manage to get four new chapters edited and a fair bit of outline reworked. On the downside, having nothing to do except write was a bit frustrating at times; sometimes I need to do something else whilst my mental batteries recharge. I also think I prefer to write in isolation - an occasional write-in at a cafe is fun, especially in the frenzied atmosphere of NaNoWriMo, but a whole week? No offence to my companions, but I think I'll give it a miss in future :)