I Don't Usually Do Hallmark Days...

I certainly don't do mother's day.  In the past I've always felt that if you need to be told by a greetings card company that you should tell your mother what she means to you then there's something seriously wrong with you.   Yes, I know that Mothering Sunday is traditionally a Christian festival dating back to the Roman Empire, but that's not what it is now, is it?  These days it's just another way to part fools from their money and I'm more than capable of parting with my money on my own, thank you very much.  So, as I say, I don't usually do mother's day.

But this year I did.  With everything that's going on with Gran, especially after Friday (we both thought she wouldn't be waking up on Saturday), I want her to know how much she means to me.  I want to write it across the sky in thousand foot neon letters for the whole world to see.  Given our history, everything that's gone on between us, I want her to be in no doubt how I feel about her.

Of course I cant do thousand foot letters in the sky, so I settled for a daft little present and cooking Sunday lunch for the three of us.  But it turns out daft little presents and roasted meats doesn't quite do enough (for me) to be sure she knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt.  So I'm doing a bit of bloggery to make a public statement.

I love you Mum.  Happy Mother's Day.

Beyond the meta-

This time last year, one of the projects I was working on (alongside the insanely talented Lou Armer and the astonishing Jim Moon) was a musical web-comic.  The working title for it was Evil Terry's Cookery School For Bad Guys.  Although it was essentially a web-comic with some nice tunes, we were looking to use social networking and new media as part of the narrative process, make it more interactive than a website you visit once a week.

So back matter got developed, scripts got written, sketches got drawn, music got composed, various characters got blog* sites or signed up to various networks.  It was all coming together quite nicely when real life did what real life does: be real and live.  The project drifted into development hell, other things came up, people got busy and Terry made his way towards the might have been shelf.

In all honesty, I hadn't thought about him for quite some time until this morning when I opened the twitters and saw this

Now I know this is the kind of thing that clever post-modernist writers use to explore the blah blah blah, but although I did set up a twitter account for Terry, I don't think I ever told anyone it was there.  So that was a surreal moment to go with the morning coffee.

So what am I going to do now?  I'm going to follow the bastard and see what he has to say.

(*Just as an aside, I find it amusing that blogger is telling me the word 'blog' is a spelling mistake.)

Word Cxunt

So I'm doing this project where the word count of each episode is pretty important.  The strapline for the whole this is "One hundred words per chapter, One hundred chapters."

I discovered at the weekend that although Open Office tells me each chapter IS one hundred words, in Microsoft's Word it's 98, or 99.

Today, I discovered that if you open the same chapter in an old version of Open Office, the word count is less than 95.

What the fuck is going on with that?

I'm thinking of a different word now.

If you want to follow the project, there's a button over there on the right.