Remember November

For the next 30 days, I will be concentrating on three personal projects and three only. The first will be a Ruby project called The Collective. I'm not revealing any more about it, but I'm hoping it'll be pretty big if I get a sizeable chunk of it done by the end of this month. The second is a little bit of musical amateurism, namely to record some stuff with Cubase and Garageband on my MacBook. This is to keep me sane (if nothing else) and keep my creative brain ticking over. And on the subject of creativity, the third project is writing a novel. That last bit is particularly scary, but I'm giving it a go. It won't be as stressful as it sounds, as the main idea behind it is to just get a first draft out of the door without fear of beating one's self up over it being perfect.

To aid the three projects, I'm stripping back on a lot of things that are cluttering life up a little at the moment. I'll be avoiding alcohol. I'll be shunning social networking, such as Facebook and Twitter - any contact with those social tools will be entirely via this blog. Any personal messages can be sent to me via email or phone (particularly stuff about news items that I might be interested in, as that's the biggest drain on my time using social networking). The television will be turned off; programmes will be stored on hard drive for watching in December. Only the wonder that is BBC Radio 4 will keep me company. This means that stuff like The Collective will be functioning a lot like a skunkworks in November, as I'll be attempting to architect it without the use of overt technology (apart from Ruby itself and GitHub).

Any proper socialising will be done over a bite to eat (arranged by people emailing, texting or calling me) or at gigs (such as seeing The Indelicates play at The 13th Note), which is slightly related to The Collective project I'm working on. I'm hoping that all my friends and colleagues who read this blog article will keep me on the straight and narrow by giving me a bollocking if it looks like I'm procrastinating online, watching telly or drinking wine.