Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel

All non-IT encumbrances are now out of the way, and I am faced with the task of starting to implement Lyvathon. My vacation is over, my 2 days of post-vacation depression are over (no other depression has occurred in over a month), and I'm all set for next weekend when my brother and I go up north to his cottage. Up there we will meet up with my childhood friend, John Newell (and his partner, Barb), who I haven't seen in over 40 years. Tomorrow evening I must make 2 phone calls, and later I must make 2 medical appointments.

Back to the present, I am faced with the software coder's equivalent of a hazy idea of what to write, along with a working title. Unlike a typical writer of fiction, I've spent the past 20 years (working sporadically) on the predecessors of Lyvathon, but have written very little code until now. Last winter I wrote a few hundred lines of code, but I can reuse only a very small portion of that code. Most code I must now write will be brand new.

Like Mr. Earbrass, I must find a way to get over the initial hurdle of being faced with a blank page. I could write, say, "It was a dark and stormy night," but my Java compiler would take a dim view of such a feeble effort. I could instead write several lines of code which would all boil down to the following-- 'system.out.println("It had begun to snow.");' --and would be rewarded with a clean compile, but of course it wouldn't do anything useful. At some point I must take the bull by the horns and start modifying my top-level code, deciding which low-level code to keep, gutting everything in-between, and get busy writing new code.

Having read the Saturday Globe and Mail, I will probably end up reading the news at cbc.ca (a daily ritual) before doing any work today. At least I've written a blog post about my current project, without getting any actual work done. Despite my getting-started woes, I'm lucky to have the financial freedom to do what I want. Most people are forced to do whatever their boss tells them to. Those who are self-employed are weighed down with responsibilities and must put in long hours, locked in a Darwinian struggle of survival of the fittest business venture. So I really can't complain. Hi ho, hi ho, my code is what must grow, da da, da da, da da, da da, hi ho, hi ho! Hopefully most of these posts will make more use of brevity, as unfortunately I can be long-winded at times. Pardon me while I continue my procrastination.