Ah, freelance work. You barely call in January, hardly a whisper. Was it something I said?, I thought to myself. And then, February heats up. And now, I’ve got two and a half crammed weeks ahead of me, which is probably going to significantly reduce any chance of blogging more than “Urk”. (It’s one of the things I like about Twitter – I feel like I can be a lot more free-associative and random over there, when I’ve only got 140 word entries to play with. It doesn’t feel right to not put something vaguely significant here. Or maybe it’s just me…)

Being busy is good, although it does mean I’ll be slowing down a bit on the book. I passed the 100,000 word mark on Chill Out. And I’m nowhere, NOWHERE near done. I reckon there’s a good 40,000 words to go before I’ve got the entire story down. Once that happens, there’ll be trimming, and streamlining, and hopefully it’ll be a relatively sensible size. I’m still having decent ideas – only today, a bit of the climax that I’d choreographed in my head that was still bothering me suddenly resolved itself, and it means I’ve got a nice bit of action that’s also emotional and only takes a small amount of setup. I’m still aware of the fact that this is going to be a truly massive amount of work once the first draft is done… but I still feel like there’s something there, something that’s a bit more characterful than The Hypernova Gambit (of which I am still planning on final, devil-may-care rewrite to get it comfortably under 150,000 words. Or maybe lower. I’m feeling daring…).

And, following what’s becoming a faintly regular feature of posting cool music-related stuff I’ve found, here’s the latest video from off-beat US rock band Ok Go. I found out about them purely because of their video for ‘Here We Go Again’, which is a brilliant bit of lo-fi filmmaking that just consists of the four members of the band doing an intricate bit of choreography on a series of treadmills and – this being the key to the whole exercise – it’s all done in one static shot. I can remember watching the video and being incredibly impressed that they actually got away with such a looney idea – it’s also the kind of thing that’s difficult to top, and can easily turn into the one thing that band is known for. Well, with their latest video, This Too Shall Pass, I think they’ve actually managed to top it – it’s a wonderfully demented idea. Admittedly, I’ve seen something in this ballpark before – there’s a video by The Bravery called ‘An Honest Mistake’ which is based around a fairly big Rube Goldberg-style setup, but most of it’s generated through clever editing. Here, it’s all done for real, in one take (there’s one point where there may be an edit, but it’s really difficult to tell), and it’s a thing of nutty beauty that’s worth enjoying:

And, for completion’s sake, here’s a link to the Here We Go Again treadmill video.

Right. Lots to do. And not much time to do it in…