It has been 107 days since I called the Pictonaut Challenge to an end. Since then this blog has remained eerily silent; dead, but dreaming; trapped in an uneasily and restless slumber. This is because I decided that I needed a bit of a holiday from writing. After three and a half years of constant self-imposed deadlines I was getting a little burnt out and my mind had begun to fray at the edges. Writing had become less than easy and less than rewarding. So what have I been doing with myself? Not a great deal that could be counted as productive, that’s for sure. It’s been a delightful spell of general pottering, television, computer games and reading. All without the looming spectre of deadlines and expectations. The rest has done me good, and although I don’t expect to restart the Pictonaut Challenge any time soon it has made any writing I’ve chosen to do a lot easier. Instead of staring at a screen for an entire day, battering my brains out and only having 200 words to show for it, I’ve actually gotten things done. Only last week I managed to knock out 1,800 words over the course of a day without so much as breaking a sweat. It was a refreshing change and reminded me that writing doesn’t necessarily have to be hard. Once I’m satisfied that my convalescence is at and end I might even find the time to finish those bigger projects which have been living on the back-burner for far too long. But in lieu of any actual new content, and being a scientist at heart, I thought I’d dig into some of the statistics from the Pictonaut Challenge.

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