Books, and More Work Than can be Handled

It has been quite a few months (almost 6!) since I last updated this blog. Since then there have been quite a few changes in my life, most of them for the better... but they have meant that I have been crazy busy.

I am back to doing mad things with computers... sysadmin, installations, testing and building. That's creating lot of useful things for me to play with, which is why I've started a new blog: Bioinformatics Adventures in Unix.

Rather than being a blog, this is more like a live journal where I can write down and document things that I learn about unix systems and software installs in the area of Bioinformatics. This brings in a few dollars per month from advertising and visitors... but it also acts as a place where I can store ideas and methods that, later, I want to turn into a book.

I've also restarted writing for my recipes blog and my main recipes website. These have languished a little and I need to increase my earnings from them again. What this really means is that both sites need a complete overhaul of their underlying code to make them faster, more responsive, and more standards compliant for today's web. As always, there is more work to do than I can handle.

In addition I've persuaded my wife to start working on a book of African recipes. She does most of the cookery whilst I take the photographs and write down the recipes. Then I handle recipes from those regions of Africa that my wife does not know about yet. I'm also trying to persuade her to write her own blog on African cookery and our move to South Africa...

The African Recipes book is a long-term project and involves travel and plenty of work. We reckon that a first draft of the book will be ready in about two years' time (I never realized just how much work the photography and presentation is for a book like this). So we have plenty of work set out for us.

I'm also taking the recipes and text I have for the Forme of Cury, along with my new translation and I'm editing this into a book which I hope to have ready about August next year. A lot of work has gone into the website for my translation and redaction of this book, including a novel font. This is an important book, the first cookery book in the English language and no-one has tackled it properly since the 1790s! So it's time a modern version of the book came out, particularly as I now have a font to represent the original text in a facsimile form.

If that were not enough, I'm also back into academic writing and getting plenty of work writing up technical reports and custom research.

As always, work is where you find it... and, thankfully, I'm getting more than enough work to keep me busy!

With Halloween just around the corner, I do have a free gift for you. Simply go over to the Free Celtnet Recipes page and you can grab your FREE (no strings attached) Halloween Recipes eBook. (Yes, the book is completely free for you to download, I don't even ask for your email address!)