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The (first?) 2010 general election was a serious matter, but it was also great fun. For the first time since 1997 I've found myself excited about voting. While I was registered in South Derbyshire (Conservative gain from Labour), I've been closely following the Brighton Pavilion race and hoping to see the election of the first Green MP.

I started last night at a birthday party in Leicester. Things were winding down at three thirty so I headed across a quiet city to the bus station. I phoned Glue Gun 91's party head-quarters for news (they had a 6am license at the Victory). No updates on the Brighton counts, but it sounded like a successful event.

The bus journey was slow and dull. The book I had was irritating me so I snoozed, occasionally vibrated awake by texts from Mr. Pashley with the latest results.

Just after dawn I reached East Midlands Airport. I found the pre-paid taxi booth where I was amazed to be quoted £13 for the 4 mile journey (£4 for the first mile, and £1.80 a mile after that, apparently). I've definitely changed since my recent holiday. I found a taxi and haggled over the price. It was still expensive, but I had enough of a reduction to salve my ego. All those early morning negotiations with auto-rickshaw drivers have come in useful!

Back in my rural hideout I followed the election with digital radio and my dodgy GPRS connection. I applauded the empty room when I heard Caroline Lucas give her acceptance speech. It's been a long and often contentious campaign, but I think the results will be remembered long after the petty smears are forgotten. (What do you expect from a candidate who can't even throw a birthday party for a horse?) Too excited to go to bed, I hiked to the next village to watch events on my parents' TV. I stayed up until the BBC called a Hung Parliament then crawled off to sleep in their spare room.

The next few days look like being confusing, fascinating and exciting. I'm looking forward to seeing what changes a Green MP makes. And I'm actually looking forward to another election. I think I want to be more involved in this one.

I meant to write a couple of posts for the turn of the year but I didn't have time. It's interesting to think about 2009/10 now, almost three weeks into 2010.

2009 was a little disappointing. Programming took more of my energy than I'd have liked, meaning writing projects, including the novel, didn't get the attention they should have done. The year was pretty good – I ran 600 miles, did over a dozen readings, made great progress on my novel – but I would like to have done more.

So far 2010 has been a blast. Despite the snow, I've managed to do some running and am, just about, on track for the Brighton Marathon in April. My talk at the Catalyst Club, on How to Escape on a WW2 POW Camp, seemed to be very well received.

The most exciting news is that I've become a freelancer. I'm planning to do both writing and programming work in 2010, but so far I've been exclusively working on some writing projects. One of these was an essay which included some fictional sections – I'll announce that when it comes out.

Even more exciting, I'm off to India tomorrow. It's amazing to think that in about 30 hours I'll be landing in Delhi. I'm going to be away for a couple of months and will be taking the opportunity to get away from my computer as much as possible. I will be contactable by email, but I'll only be checking every few days. There will also be some blog posts, as a friend has agreed to scan in some letters.

2010 has been pretty good so far. I'm looking forward to seeing what more it brings.

I'm running a little late with this so I'll post it briefly now before it's too out of date. My favourite films of 2009 were:

1. Synecdoche, New York – currently my favourite film ever.
2. Antichrist – although I had my eyes closed for a couple of bits
3. Morris: A Life with Bells On – I had a great time seeing this at the Duke of York's, surrounded by real-life morris dancers
4. Up – although mostly for the first five minutes.
5. The Wrestler
   – I was underwhelmed when I watched this, because the ending seemed a
   disappointment, but I found myself thinking about it a lot afterwards.

I didn't see as many movies last year as in 2008, and I missed a few
that looked amazing. I was underwhelmed by both Moon and
District 9, which seemed illogical and obvious. I'm not sure why they
received the acclaim they did.

Today has an end-of-term feel as it's my last day at my current job. It's been a fun role, maintaining and developing a mature product. I've learned a lot (maintenance coding is a challenging and often neglected skill) and done some fascinating optimisation work, but it's time to move on.

I'm taking some time out at the start of 2010, after which I will be working as a freelancer, providing database and java consultancy – but I'll talk about that next year. At the moment I'm winding down, looking forward to Christmas and some time relaxing in the Midlands.

The snow, and lunch with a couple of old friends have provided a magical feeling to the day. I've also received some good news about some writing work for January, which I'll take as an auspcious sign for the coming year.

My inbox is empty, my last commits are in subversion, which means I have one task left in the new job: tonight's office party!

Every morning, on his way to work, my boss buys an espresso from the Red Roaster. They serve it in two paper cups, presumably so he doesn't burn his fingers. In the afternoon, about three, he wanders off to buy another coffee.

When each drink is finished, he adds the cup to the stack on his desk. When the stack becomes large enough, he transfers the cups to a larger stack behind his desk. Four cups a day, twenty cups a week. That's about a thousand a year. He's been in the office over three years – you can imagine how many cups we have in the office.

The cups sit in a corner and I sometimes wonder what we should do with them. Should we return them to the red roaster? Put them on freecycle? Hold a Burning of the Cups Ceremony on the beach? Someone suggested making a sculpture and donating it to Fabrica.

The boss was late in on Friday. We decided to build a tower of cups, to see if we could reach the roof. We could. The column contains about 800 cups. For a day or so I felt satisfied that we'd finally done something with some of the cups. This morning, it doesn't seem enough.

What do you do with over 3000 paper cups?

The remains of an earlier tower. Look on my works, ye mighty, and all that.

• My new Argus marathon blog post is 633 miles to go, in which I discuss being a human Jesus Lizard.
• I like Alan Coren's advice to Caitlin Moran: "The first idea that occurs to you, will have
  occurred to everyone. The second idea that occurs to you, will have
  already also occurred to the clever people. But your third idea – only
  you will have had that one.”
• After Swindon Orbital, Richard Willis is now working on Blake's Road, which promises "a more ambitious project, tackling a number of subjects simultaneously: Blake, England & the English, Morality, my own psychology, and a couple of other topics I’m afraid I must keep to myself for now". I'm looking forward to seeing what comes of this.
• A interesting post from Ian Hocking about Workshops, following on from my recent one
• My friend Bill Jones has made a book

On December 13th I'm taking a day-trip to Hastings. Despite living there for 6 months, I never explored the Old Town. On Sunday I will put this right. In the evening I will then read my new horror story The Other Child at Short Fuse:

"Sarah and I broke up a year back and we’ve both seen other people since, but she still calls me when there’s a problem. A few months after we split she phoned one Sunday morning because there was a spider in the bath.  That time, with the spider, I thought it was an excuse, that she was too embarrassed to say what she really wanted. I flushed the spider, followed her to the kitchen and put my arm around her. It was fairly awkward when Sarah explained that it was just about the spider. I apologised and went back home to bed."

I've been writing a few horror stories lately. Reading horror stories as a teenager, particularly the Best New Horror anthologies, was what made me fall in love with short stories. Most of what I read was disposable, but I also read some truly amazing works.

Short Fuse Hastings takes place at the Jenny Lind, Hastings (TN34 3EW) and starts at 7pm.

My latest post went up last week at the Literature Network – The Six Perils of Writing Workshops:

“Imagine if driving was taught by something like writing workshops. Each session, a group of learners would watch a colleague try a manoeuvre. Afterwards they would take turns to say what they felt went right and what went wrong, with occasional input from an instructor. It would be chaos, and not in a good way. As the New Yorker declared, in a review of Mark McGurl’s history of creative writing programmes and American fiction, The Programme Era, “[workshops are based] on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem”

The full article lists a number of problems with writing workshops. My friend Kay Sexton has written a post listing some other issues, most of which I agree with. She concludes that “a workshop process is a good one, as part of your writing trajectory, or to dip into and out of at various stages in your writing career“.

I’m not currently involved with any writing workshops (I prefer to think of Write Club as an anti-workshop) but they’ve been an important part of my development as a writer. Umi Sinha‘s workshops at CCE taught me a great deal about editing, as well as introducing me to some good friends such as @LaGirafa. I then studied for an MA in Creative and Critical Writing at Sussex where the workshops were more theory based but good for examining why I write. At the moment I don’t feel comfortable with writing workshops, but I know my writing has improved in the past through many of the talented people I have workshopped with.

I've been meaning post some links for ages. Some of these are a few weeks old, but far from stale.

• I often find myself disliking movies everyone loves. I hate this – I'd far rather enjoy a film than pick holes in it. This year I had huge problems with Moon and District 9. Some of my reasons for disliking the latter are summed up in this article
• still fighting the war
• While I find it hard to forgive his ads ("you do an advert, you're off the artistic role call"), David Mitchell's article Let's admit it. Hypocrisy oils the wheels is a brilliant piece on political hypocrisy
• I loved this story, about how the blogger behind linkmachinego
  guessed the identity of Belle-de-Jour. He then set up a tripwire so he'd know if someone else found out. The Belle-de-jour saga has been interesting, with some fascinating suspects including Sarah Champion, Stewart Home (also), or Andrew Orlowski. It's been heartwarming to see how many people guessed the secret then never told anyone.
• Max Dunbar has written a great post on Why Self-Publishing Doesn't Work. The piece makes a great antidote to the Kool-Aid about self publishing.
• A wicked post on NaNoWriMo from Ariana Osbourne

• After a short hiatus, I'm posting to the Brighton Argus marathon blog again. My most recent posts are A Frustrating Few Weeks and The Doldrums. Despite these titles, training has recently been going well.
• I planned my marathon training schedule last week and was horrified to discover I have 663 miles to go before finishing the marathon.
• Alan Moore's new magazine, Dodgem Logic is now out. I liked the review that described it as "resembling if anything, a fanzine version of Radio 4" The magazine is hoping for people to set up local franchises – hopefully it won't be long before a Brighton edition appears.
• I recently posted about Tim Clare's attempt to write 100 poems in a day. This was successful, and there's an interesting summary on his blog along with links to some of the most interesting poems produced.
• A couple of Saturday's ago was the Brighton sketchcrawl, the second time Kay Sexton has encouraged me to try drawing. Photographic proof is provided here by mockduck.