Still no mentionable creativity to report, I'm afraid. Surely the baby is still to blame, but still, it makes me feel uncomfortable from time to time. I feel I'm not living up to my own expectations. Then again, I realize on a more conscious level that I'm being too harsh on myself. A third child is a big change in one's life, especially if that child is born ten weeks early - with all the worry and stress that accompanies any birth.
Right now, the baby is relatively low-impact compared to our other kids, who were, quite frankly, terrible screamers... they both suffered from acid reflux - quite common, I know, but they had quite severe reflux problems.
Baby boy Nand does not have this problem - so far - but like all babies must, he puts in for a few hours of crying and general restlessness each day. Mostly in the late evenings, between nine and twelve PM. My creative hours, yes that's right.

So up to now, I have not touched my keyboard for anything other than some light surfing, Day Jobbery, and the occasional session of Sins of a Solar Empire. Cool game, that, by the way. A real space strategy game, in fact, many people think it's the first space strategy game that is really executed (almost) perfectly. It looks fabulous - zooming in and out between planets and star systems is a joy in itself - and the gameplay is very involved. All the favorite aspects of RTS games are present: resource gathering, technology development paths, building a fleet, pirate raiders, diplomacy, scouting, etc.
All in all, just the kind of game to idle away a few hours waiting for the baby's night feeding, and nothing too serious that suffers from frequent interruptions when he wakes up and needs to be picked up for a couple of minutes.

Anyway. I hope his sleeping pattern stabilizes just a little more, so I can get back to writing in earnest quickly.

The internetz giveth, the internetz taketh. Just wanted to mention that while the net saps away a lot of time, as I am wont to spend far too much time browsing to my favorite author blogs, agent blogs, message boards and whatnot; but on the other hand, at some points the people you interact with there do stimulate you to get back to it.
A fairly chance conversation with someone on the sffchronicles Publishing board, followed up by some private messages, while not completely writing-related, has brought back the urge to write. And to write right now, tonight, as soon as possible. Strange how some little things do that to you.

Expect normal blogging service to resume gradually, starting today. Our baby boy has finally come home yesterday evening, after six weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit. He's still only 36 weeks, so he should not have been born for another three or four, but thankfully he has grown strong enough to come home.

Forty-four days. It was long enough.

It's been almost a month since I wrote anything here. I had not expected the impact of our baby boy being born two months early to be so big; it's hard to imagine how that affects your "real life".

I've noticed that I miss writing. I know now that it makes sense for me to keep trying to write stuff that other people might want to read, because I at least enjoy writing it. I feel "useless" when I'm not doing anything creative at night, and it's a feeling I've had a lot lately, even though I know - rationally - that I cannot take on any other projects at the moment. Between spending time in the NICU, spending time with my kids, and high pressure at work... I'm all spent. But it feels awkward not working on anything else.

It probably makes no sense if you don't have this same - drive? But there it is. It's a bug gnawing away at me, an itch that keeps driving me in circles at night. And when our little boy comes home and life returns to normal, I'll finally be able to scratch. I look forward to it.

Our baby boy is doing fine, breathing on his own since this afternoon. He's still on the NICU of course, and needs round the clock care and monitoring.

Combined with my wife's recovery from the C-section, blogging activity will be intermittent to nonexistant. Writing fiction not planned for the next few weeks.
Total exhaustion of the mind has sapped away the creative drive. Let's hope it comes back soon.

Oh yes. Got a rejection from Futurismic, but couldn't care less in these circumstances!

Yesterday my wife gave birth to our third child, a baby boy called Nand. Those of you who know me a little better know that this is not all good news. She was only 30 weeks pregnant, so he was forced onto this planet a full two months early. Things are looking okay at the moment but we'll be living from moment to moment for the coming eight weeks or so...

Expect very light blogging until then.

Feel quite good tonight. Saw my grandmother in the hospital today, she was a little better than I'd feared, which was nice.
Also, I went running for the first time in months. Only about 3km I think, but for a first not bad; and as I've got a whole lot of winter fat to get rid of, that's just going to be the beginning. I definitely feel a lot more energetic already. I used to swim competitively until I was about 22, but since then I've gone down from 20+ hours of training per week to absolutely zero.

The challenge now is to build at least two or three hours back into my (kind of busy) daily routine. I work full time, have two kids with a third on the way and I like to spend lots of time with them and the love of my life, my newly PhD'ed wife, and I want to become a published SFF writer. Add in some exercise and well, we're looking at a preferred day/night cycle of the kind found on... Pluto. Well, maybe that's a little over the top (6 Earth days if for some reason you find this interesting, as I do) but still. Too much to do. And that's leaving my graphic & webdesign freelancing out of the picture. Arrgh!

Anyway. Pondering whether I should start a weight/exercise log here as well, but who'd want to know about that?

Not much writing or blogging getting done these past few days. There's a simple reason: real life has stepped up and swept me to highs and lows both:

• my lovely wife defended her Ph.D. dissertation Monday night, so there was quite a build-up to that. She did great of course, and I'm now happily married to a doctor - albeit not a medical one :-)


• at the same time my grandmother took a turn for the worse. She's in hospital now, we'll see how she recovers. As she's suffering from oncoming dementia, it's difficult to tell how well she will cope.


• the day job is extremely busy and demanding.

Still, some links for the day:

>> Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing spotted a story about a group of eighteen-year-olds who sent a helium balloon 100,000ft up (just over 30km), right to the edge of outer space; their simple craft had a basic Nikon digital camera which survived the drop (at its extreme height the balloon popped because of the too-low air pressure) and brought home amazing pictures of its rise over the Barcelona area, up into space, and back down again.
Did some digging of my own and the full story with lots of pics and info is here: Meteotek 08 (this is the students' project blog in Catalan).

>> Mind-boggling wordage to be seen over at Jay Lake's. He's updated his bibliography. He has sold 240(!) short stories and written 8 novels so far. Blimey.

Off to the Ardennes later this afternoon; will most likely be 100% offline until Sunday late afternoon. Let's the weather holds up - with 14 adults and 9 children under 5 it might get a little busy if we have to spend all weekend indoors :-)