I declare today to be "graphic media day". Which is really just a fancy way of saying "Here are four photos and a video for you all". Because, really, I should be packing and making sure all my chargeable things are charged and so on.

And I do need to put time aside to do excited, loon-ish dances of loonish excitement.

Firstly, please accept this week's video for fivedotnerds. I call it "Zombies vs. Jam" but others might, more accurately, call it a sort-of review of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Lost in Austen. There's a challenge of sorts issued towards the end, too.



And now for the pictures, two of which include me looking like unto a loon (which will explain the loonish dancing earlier on this post). Here we go...




So there you go. And now, I really should go and pack if I intend to wear clothes while I'm in Sydney for the next four days...

It's writing week at fivedotnerds! Again! I have no idea how it manages to roll around so quickly. How can three weeks pass by without my noticing them? It doesn't seem right.

It is also:

1. The last day of term


2. Practically the first day of my holidays


3. A dress-up day at work, therefore I am dressed up


4. Only a week until I'm in Sydney with LOOOOOOOOONS!!

More on that later. For now, please accept this video with numerous, vaguely-entertaining background noises, as well as my thoughts on world-building:



When it comes to world-building, I suffer from a sense of mis-placed achievement. If I were to sit there and map out the world and write pieces about the history and the culture, then my brain would decide that this is it. Hooray! We have done the work and the work is good.

Pity it's not a story, but you can't have everything. Or so they say.

Damn them.

Tell me all about your world-building. Or when you think it goes over-board. Or doesn't go far enough. You can throw in your plans for world-domination, if you wish - provided it's your own world you plan to dominate and not this one.

The problem is that I'm completely distracted by shiny stuff. For instance (as you would otherwise be unaware of it), I am going to tell you that I just spent ten minutes between the previous sentence and this one reading over information about the new iPhone.

The shiny, I am powerless to resist it.

But it's the shiny's fault, really. It's always so tempting; so tantalising; so... emblematic of the sine qua non. Without my shiny, I am nothing.

Which isn't quite true.

At least, I hope not.

But there's always something, isn't there? Something you need to make you feel more complete or better-equipped or on the edge of breakthrough technology. Or something.

(Hmmm, too many somethings. Perhaps the shiny is short-circuiting my internal thesaurus...)

In my case, however, there's often a missing step. For instance: I want the published book to my name without the unfortunate necessity of having to write and edit it in the first place. Or I want the amazing new job without having to bother with applying and interviewing and impressing. No matter what I have, I always want something else, preferably right now.

From all of this, I can only conclude that I'm lazy and easily-distacted. I may need help.

Or it could not. I would, of course, be referring to over-thinking. I do it all the time. No seriously, All. The. Time. To offer a case in point: the reason I haven't written in this journal for the last week and a bit is because I keep over-thinking the process. Where normal people would just sit down and blog about things, I have to turn them over and examine them from all angles and ask them questions.

By which point, it's about two days later and the news, she is old.

The reason for most of this thinking? Oh, that would be the new blog I'm putting together for my work. Not to mention browsing through other writers' blogs. It's making me want to work out what should go on here, or if I should get a domain again... I don't know. And I still want to incorporate more videos into this thing, as a sort of complementary thing.

But I know I'll just end up over-thinking it, by which time it'll be a decade later and the internet will be, like, sooooooo passé.

Anyway, in news that isn't old and hasn't been over-thought (but does most definitely involve brains), I should mention that the fivedotnerds channel is under seige... by the undead.



Any tips on what we should do to survive the onslaught? I'm not sure I prepared myself well enough, really...

Ever wondered what a beta does? Ever wondered how a beta lives their life? Is it all parts of speech and punctuation, or do we actually have fun?

To the last question, I say: Parts of speech and punctuation are fun. Punctuation especially.

This week, I thought I'd allow you all a glimpse into the world of a beta. And here it is: the very first episode of the Secret Beta Chronicles.

Yes, genre, despite the fact that I kept referring to this video as "my thoughts on grammar". I have no idea why. It's not as though I'm obsessively interested in grammar or anything.

It's writing week again! The fact that this has rolled around so quickly disturbs me somewhat, mostly because it seems like the previous writing week was just a couple of days ago. Which leads to the further conclusion that the year is passing far too quickly.

On the up side, this means Winter may not drag out for as long as I fear it will. However, I'm not entirely sure I want the year to pass quite this quickly.

But to return to writing week and genre-not-grammar. In this video, I talk about genre, tropes, the prejudices of my university lecturers and... well, what more could you want, actually?



I'd love to know about everyone's favourite or most influential genres, too. Are there genres you love to read but would never write, for example? Tell me all. :D

So my cold has gone from "Oh, how inconvenient to have a sniffly sort of thing right now" to "GAH am going to curl up in a corner and hope for imminent death". Hooray. However, it's not all bad, as I won't actually be returning to work until Monday, a fact that has led me to develop a cunning plan whereby I get over this thing by Friday, just in time to enjoy a sickness-free weekend.

Bonus points if I get over it by tonight, thus giving myself a three-day weekend. :D

Unsurprisingly, my sickliness made its way into my video this week thusly:



I actually managed to sound vaguely healthy while I was recording that.

Please feel free to share your tips for making yourself feel better when you're sick. There must be better ideas out there than just sitting on the couch eating junk food...