I have just moved back to Southern Africa — to Cape Town, specifically. I am preparing to start a PhD, and in the meantime am working to finish a SciFi (or fantasy depending on how strongly you feel about the definition of SciFI) novel I’ve been working intermittently on for a while.

I’m much too shy to share anything about it here before its done, but I’m very happy to have Cape Town’s (air conditioned!) public libraries to work in, and a group of friends to read the drafts.

Although I’ve always been an avid consumer of stories, I don’t have training in the skills to write them, and the more I do it, the more impressed I am by people that do it as their career. Coding is (or was, it’s mostly obsolete now with the new GenAI tooling) a nice profession because it was interesting at two levels of abstraction. Designing the high level architectures of things you were building was compelling, but then it was also pretty nice to toil away getting the code written, talking to other code, and working correctly. Little puzzles, interesting for their own sake. So far writing is fun in the first sense — coming up with the story — but my goodness the concrete task of actually getting the sentences onto the page is tough. I can recognize the same kinds of little puzzles in flow, structure, dialogue and so on, but writers must find solving them engaging and natural, in a way I certainly do not — at least not yet.

If I can train myself just enough to output prose a skilled editor may be able to salvage, then I hope to finish this project this year. Wish me luck!