Supermarkets

For your delight and delectation, another piece published via Triond.

Please take a moment to go to the page and, if you would, another moment to tell others about it.

Thank you kindly

Writing for pennies (2)

Suddenly, it's all worthwhile: screenshot from my Triond page

Writing for pennies

I've thought for a long time about trying to earn some extra money by writing: I'm fairly confident that I can string a sentence together, and I occasionally have what seems to me to be an original idea. The problem has been that writing novels takes a lot of time, non-commissioned TV scripts rarely get accepted and sending short stories to magazines is an excellent way of building up an impressive collection of rejection slips (which all writers get, I know).

I had a look at freelance writing online, which looks possible - there are a lot of sites offering work writing short articles - but it helps a lot to have a body of previous work at which prospective employers can look. I've therefore decided to try Triond, who will accept articles, pictures, etc. on any subject, and then publish it on one of their syndicated websites. Using a formula involving page views and ad clicks, they then pay a few cents into my Paypal account.

The first such piece of mine is here. I know it's not exactly literature, but I'd be extraordinarily grateful if either or both of my readers could go have a look at it, and if possible mark it with their favourite social bookmarking site (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.) and email their friends to say "Hey, read this." Doing so may make the difference between Hovis and Tesco Value bread for me come the end of the month...

Ideas that are more personal will still appear from time to time on this blog, but those times when I get a thought in my head and think "I could maybe blog about that sometime" will hopefully turn into articles for general consumption.

Saturday Night Live

Verse of the day

I have no idea how Bible Gateway generate their 'verse of the day', which I get as an RSS feed, and I am cautious of taking single out-of-context verses and saying "That is just meant for me", in the same way as any random newspaper horoscope can seem meaningful, but I was both amused and moved to find that yesterday's verse was Titus 2:2 and then today's is Isaiah 46:4.

Because I need reminding

I was feeling a bit rubbish earlier so I walked over to the Central Library in my lunchbreak, wandered around the novels and then went upstairs and picked up a copy of Angels on the Walls, which I'd read several years before. I sat down in the nearest seat and started reading. After a while I wanted to move to a seat with a table to rest the book on so I wandered across and picked one on the grounds that it was as far as possible from other people. I'd been sitting concentrating on the book, until a point where the author was talking about Jesus loving everyone, and my mind drifted off into thinking about John 3:16 and explaining that God so loved the world - not just the nice people or the people who are going to follow him - when I looked away from the book to the graffiti on the bit of wall in front of me. This is the first thing that I saw:

Harder, better, faster, stronger

I've downloaded Nokia Sports Tracker for my N95, and it reckons that my usual circuit of the Green is in fact just over 1km, which means I have been running slightly further than I thought. In fact, I am now running further anyway, because I have decided, since it's September, to increase my daily run to three circuits of the Green: 3.28km this morning, according to Nokia. The Sports Tracker has all sorts of nifty features, including exporting my route to Google Earth; here's what I did yesterday:

Having looked at the map from this morning's run, the margin of error for position and altitude are pretty narrow, so I'm (a) impressed and (b) likely to trust the results.

It also calculates calories burned, so I can eat cream cakes and think "I already ran this much this morning."

Reflections

I was just looking at Cumberland House on Google Earth, and I noticed that Grosvenor Square is full of reflected sunlight from the windows of the old Barclays building. Which is quite pretty, if you like that sort of thing.

Early morning runs

I've just checked my route I run in the morning on the "Distance Measurement Tool" on Google Maps and reckon that it's more or less 950 metres going around the Green, so my current run, going round twice, works out at about 1.2 miles. The plan is to build this up each month - ideally by the New Year I'd like to be doing 5 laps (just under 3 miles) but I'll have to get a balance between wanting to build up fitness and having to get up ever earlier to make time for running!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

On top of the tower, Alcaudete castle

We went to the castle today for the guided tour. Which was in Spanish. Despite lots of people, guide books and websites saying that everyone in Andalucia speaks English, in fact practically nobody here does. This is probably because this really isn't a tourist destination - which is great. I managed to gather from the woman from the tourist office who showed us round the castle that they simply don't get English visitors. Anyway, we are managing just fine, and causing much amusement in shops with our pointing and mangled phrasebook vocabulary.

France

Sitting in MacDonald.s in Le Mans, free wifi but got to go now. All good so far

Health Secretary recognises the benefits of exercise

DSC00041.JPG

Hmm. As you can see, I'm trying out ShoZu, which seems to more or less do what it says on the tin on my W200i, though with a few not-very-clear menu commands (hence the picture above getting uploaded with its original title, not the one that I thought I'd given it, and without a description. But, it does seem a nifty little Java app for sending stuff from my phone to Facebook, Twitpic, Blogger - or lots of other places - so I guess I'll persevere with it.

Just for clarity, the picture above was sent from my phone, without going into a browser, just by using the ShoZu app. All this text I added later on my laptop.

Slogan

Today: better than yesterday, not as good as tomorrow

Sunshine superprophet

I had Donovan's Sunshine Superman stuck in my head, and I actually thought about this, but then I thought "No, God's not speaking through a Donovan song. The lyrics are just hippy nonsense."

Then I realised (after two days of having the tune coming back into my head, even when I've been listening to other stuff), that in fact I only had one line that was going through my head, over and over again.

The line?

"When you've made your mind up forever to be mine"

Schadenfreude

There's something curiously satisfying about seeing a Rolls Royce Bentley with a parking ticket.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

What I did today

Pictures from this afternoon's party for the cast and crew of "Once Upon A Fairy Tale" are here.

I had a lovely afternoon.

Reasons to be cheerful, one, two, er...

As I crossed the busy road in front of our office at lunchtime without waiting for the traffic lights to change, I started thinking about the negative consequences of being hit by a car and killed, and then realised that they were all about other people being upset or inconvenienced. It didn't occur to me to think of things that I want to do with my life. So then I thought I'd try compiling a mental list of "Things I really want to do before I die", and I couldn't actually think of anything. There's lots of things I'd like to do, some of which I will do and some I'm pretty sure I won't, but I couldn't think of anything that would make me think "I really really want to do that", other than "Have my family grow up to a point where it's not going to be a complete disaster when I die".

I wonder if it's selfish to live in such a way that people are very upset when you die (as you must), or if there's some kind of balance between bringing good things into the lives of others and their inevitable grief when you're gone. Me, I hate upsetting people; better stay alive.

Brave noob world

Preaching School

Image via Wikipedia Reflecting on last night's preaching school, I have to say that although James has put a fantastic amount of work into it, and Jon, Karen and Matt are great and very supportive, I feel less sure that I would want to carry on to the point where I was preaching in front of the church. This is partly because of my generic laziness - the positively-phrased feedback last night included the word "underprepared" - but, more seriously, because I can see two major problems. Firstly, I am too busy to be able to do this properly and take it as seriously as it should be. I can't even manage to do basic housework, let alone put in the amount of time and effort that preaching in public needs. I wouldn't put myself forward to lead a small group or do children's work, precisely because I know I couldn't give the commitment, and even allowing for preaching not being very frequent, I'm not sure I should say I'll do it if I don't think I'll be able to do it properly. Secondly, I am chronically depressed, with acute phases of misery and despair. This means that when I preach from the heart, I will not actually be giving a very good impression of giving Good News. Last night I really thought I'd given a sober but balanced exposition of the passage, and it wasn't until it was pointed out to me that I realised that I had missed out on the positive element of it and basically said "Life is shit, and that's the way it is". Now, I may think that about my life, but I cannot generalise from my point of view, and I certainly can't do it in front of church, where people will give more weight to what I say precisely because I am at the front of church, and I dare not risk generalising from my experience of life and doing it in a way that has a major impact on someone else if I don't even realise I'm doing it. I don't have anyone (other preaching school members aside) who I would go to for feedback and support, and I know that if I was asked to preach and was feeling down and miserable, I'd say "Yes, of course, that will be fine."

The only thing in favour of me carrying on is the feeling that this is something God wants me to do. On the other hand, I have previously thought that God wanted me to go into ordained ministry ("Thanks but no thanks" said the Church of England) or that God had called me to do youth work (managed to mess that one up myself), so a vague feeling that this may be how I'm supposed to use my ability to stand up and talk in public might not in itself be a good enough reason; certainly not good enough to risk doing something very important very badly.