Posted: Saturday, January 7th, 2012
Long time, no see...
Looking back, the last journal entry was just before the birth of Yoghurt-Moghurt. Wow. Quite a lot has happened since then…
For a start Yoghurt-Moghurt — we no longer call her that, by the way — is now 18 months old, toddling and chatting and trying to put on her brothers pyjamas by herself [don’t ask]. I have changed jobs, moving into teaching fulltime [a great experience, and something that I should have done earlier]. The Wombat — Yoghurt-Moghurt’s brother — had a nasty accident over the summer and lost his front teeth, but there doesn’t seem to be lasting harm, and he’ll be followed closely until his adult teeth pop through and everyone is reassred that all is definitively okay.
On the writing front, things has slowed down. Teaching and having two small children to care for means that I don’t get a lot of time. I did finish another novel [that I’m currently re-editing as I’m still not happy with it]. I took up another novel that I’d started years ago, but decided that this wasn’t going to be the time. While the story is fun, the pacing is off, and quite a few things that I thought were original ten years ago have now appeared all over the place, so I can’t really move on unless I think I’ve got something to bring to that space. The first chapter however is more or less standalone, so I might put it online here.
As I get annoyed commuting, I planned out a new novel from September to December. While there are still some details to be worked out, I’ve started on it, and it will probably be my major [personal] project for 2012.
And quite recently a couple of things came along that brought me no little pleasure. First of all, Black as Snow got picked up and tweeted about by a site that points out free ebooks. This brought a swell of visitors and downloads — over 600 since Christmas — so now downloads on that little story have gone over 1000. The second thing was much more surprising. Some time back I was contacted by Yoza, a South African site that makes short stories available over cellphones for teens there. As my short stories here are available under a Creative Commons licence, they asked permission to use and adapt Perfect Teeth. The other day while flipping through my stats and analytics I stumbled on it. Wow. Not only that but kids who read these stories had taken the time to comment. That was a real heartwarmer. For information, The Yoza Project — and I’m quoting here — “The Yoza Project, originally known as m4Lit (mobile phones for literacy), set out to explore the viability of using mobile phones to support reading and writing by youth in South Africa (SA). If mobile phones proved to be a legitimate alternative and complement to printed literature then their potential for increasing youth literacy practices of reading and writing in SA, and indeed the developing world, would be significant. Most developing countries are book-poor and mobile phone-rich, after all.” See About the Yoza Project. The project was founded by the Shuttleworth Foundation which you may have heard about as Mark Shuttleworth is also the founder of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution.
More will be coming in 2012, but until then, my best wishes to all…
Photo: Photo Booth by Apple
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