My Forty Ninth Week as a Budding Author

I had an almost rationale debate with my teenage daughter a few weeks ago that went something along these lines:-

“Dad, why do you watch Countryfile? I can’t see the point in it.”

“Well Holly, it is an extremely valuable programme on a number of levels”

“Huh?”

“Firstly, I am regularly brought up to date with the best farming practises carried out by plumb voiced farmers” 

“Mkay”

“Next, I get to see Matt and Ellie trying to make fat ramblers look interesting. Followed by John Craven getting over serious about some controversy that nobody can do anything about” 

“Hmmmm”

“But finally, and most importantly of all, I am told the weather outlook for the week”

“Dad, it’s still pointless”

“Isn’t”

“Is”

“Isn’t, isn’t, isn’t, isn’t, no returns”

Holly filled her ears with iPod earphones, mouthed “Pointless” at the television and flounced off upstairs for a skype session with Justin Beiber (or so the Skypee claims?). Don’t tell her this though, but she is mostly right. Fifty minutes of Countryfile are completely pointless but I have to sit through it in order to get to the forecast, which is the best on the box.

I know this because I have watched it all year. I use the Countryfile forecast to plan my week, deciding where to ride or whether to forget it and have some quality shed-time instead. Last week I’d planned a trip to Scotland in order to plug a few of the photography gaps. The tension built as the clock moved towards 7.15pm Sunday night, would Countryfile’s weather forecast underwrite my trip?

Simplistically, the answer was “No”. The forecaster dispensed with any charts, science or isobars. He simply pointed at Scotland and shouted “Run away! run away!”. I interpreted this to mean that a storm was coming. The BBC News channel were a little more lucid and calmly advised me not to travel. I turned to Helen and asked “What do you think?”. She told me that I would be fine, but she was holding my life insurance policy at the time so I discounted that.

To make things worse I had been really organised for once and packed for the trip in advanced. Clearly I had to cancel and thus spent Sunday evening forlornly emptying well packed bags of cycling gear onto the bedroom floor.

Cancellation meant I had to spend this week at home and in the absence of any other distractions, do some proper work on the book instead. Consequently I don’t really have anything interesting to write about at all. This is not down to a complete lack of output, there’s been loads. It’s mainly down to the fact that there is only so much blogging you can do about hitting a keyboard a lot and wiggling a mouse. Which is all I’ve really done for five days. But I will attempt to construct a few highlights as it distracts me from proper work for a while.

Firstly I’ve invented a new diagram, it’s pictured below. I spent ages on this in Adobe Illustrator and then showed it to some cycling friends.

They all responded with the same phrase. “What the f**k is that Dave” (damn, I’d promised myself a swear free blog this week). I chuntered on about wind direction and route directional statistics but they were having none of it, so we’ll be redesigning that one then.

Next, I laid out my route guide pages. This had already been done in a draft form but needed some proper precision and consistency adding to the pages. “Proper precision and consistency” comes hard to someone like me, so I spent days on it. I now have a new respect for graphic designers and arty/marketingish type people. Previously, I thought that all they did was wear niche T-shirts, eat Quinoa based salads whilst pressing a “Make this thing look much better” button in Adobe Photoshop.

Now I’ve been through it myself, I properly appreciate how hard and time consuming consistency is. Make the slightest change over here and suddenly over there looks completely wrong. So you change over there to look right, but now over here is looking dodgy. So you spend ages working on over here and over there together, sit back with a satisfied grin only to realise that whilst they both look cool the rest of the document is now a complete mess.

I’ve also been working on route statistics, both the display of them and the data capture. This comes with its own set of problems especially when you look at how I gathered them. Most route information has been captured using a GPS, this is a great little tool that logs your position every few seconds. I’ve carried one on all of my rides. The problem is that on these rides I’ve been taking photos using a process that goes something like this: 

-stop

-set camera up on tripod and press self timer

-frantically ride up road

-ride back wearing gormless face

-repeat many times until almost acceptable picture achieved

Now any sensible person would turn off the GPS logger during this process as you don’t want the photo-miles included in the route. Re-read the first three words of the last sentence and guess what I did? So all of my routes are a bit of a mess, which in turn blows my statistics and requires that somebody patiently edit the file and remove the errant logs.

More hours spent clicking at the mouse whilst staring at the screen. I think this is similar to how Air Traffic Controllers work these days, I hope they’ve banned social networking sites and forums from their computers? I’ve been tempted to ban them from mine in order to elicit some focus.

On Thursday I cracked and sneaked out for an afternoon bike ride as only us freelancers can do. The wind had other ideas, consequently cranking itself up to “11” in order to deter my skiving. But after doing a little work on my Tommy Godwin FAQ I felt obliged to persist. On that day in 1939 he had ridden 162 miles, so it would be rude of me to stay at home.

I straddled the Cross bike (it’s a technical term non-cyclists, all my bikes are delirious with pleasure) and sped out into the hills. Then I turned West and track-standed my way to Avebury in a gale. The wind was strong, cold and blustery which made things much worse, like pushing against a locked door that suddenly gives. 

Riding past Hackpen Hill I spotted a Chinook Helicopter on low level manoeuvres. I have no idea what it was trying to do, but how those pilots keep those great big things in the air in blustery gales is beyond me. I’m sure it’s all done with computers, but so is most of my book and the previous nine hundred words are testament to it not being a walk in the park. The return journey would have been stupidly fast but the Cross bike is a singlespeed. So only my legs went stupidly fast, the rest of the body and bike ambled back pleasantly.

Sitting here on the forty ninth Friday of my project I’m reasonably pleased with the week. I can actually print bits of the book out now and am almost ready to approach publishers with a “What do you think?”. The spreadsheet says at least 35 more man days required to finish the content. That translates into 3 Dave months. The savings account is in denial about the impending date called Christmas and doesn’t want to hear “3 months”.

Would anyone like to buy some bikes? One previous owner, only slightly abused, and the bikes are pretty knackered as well.

Dave

9th December 2011

WEEK 50>>>>>>>>>>>>>>