An update on the progress of That Novel, for anyone who's still even remotely interested.

To Beelzebub with backstory! Vaya al Diablo, research! Screw you with a large vegetable marrow, linguistic invention!

Why? Why am I doing this? Why can't I concentrate on churning out some unassuming little potboiler? Why did I have to get all fatbeardy and start drawing maps? Oh, sure, that's where it starts. Let's just have a cute little pointy pointy map to go in the front of the book, shall we? There, isn't that nice? But wouldn't it look even better with a few runes? Only we can't use runes, really, because they're so old hat. So we have to invent our own alphabet. Only we can't just invent our own alphabet, can we; we have to make it convincing. Which means looking at lots and lots of other people's alphabets, taking carfeful notes in our special shiny Novel Notes book. And then there's the actual language! Don't forget that. You can't just shove in any old mumbo-jumbo, oh no. You've got to sit down and devise a passable grammatical structure and about a thousand words of vocab. I'm a huge, huge nerd, aren't I? I'm a collosal and irredeemable geek. A stunningly handsome, charismatic and edgy geek, but a geek nontheless.

Oh, and I've lost all faith in my grasp of English grammar and puctuation and of course I've always spelled for shite and my dialogue still bites; everyone talks like an instuction manual. I've been writing up lab reports for too bloody long. And I know, I just know, that after all this I'm probably just going to end up with some gawdawful sub-Mercedes Lackey drivel that'll just rot on my hard drive forever and ever, Amen.

I loathe writing. Writing sucks. Books suck. All written matter is corrupt and evil and foul foul foul.