This used to be the homepage for 'Choristers and Others Writing On Holiday' (yes - really). The group was a lot like nanowrimo (in fact we ripped off their concept without an ounce of shame), but was a smaller group, and we ran it at different times of the year.

The concept was that each member of the group would try to write their own fifty thousand word novel in the space of a single calendar month. The theory was that by doing this we'd force ourselves to become novelists, and perhaps if we concentrated on delivering quantity rather than making everything perfect, we'd end up writing more quality than if we sat down and pulled our hair out obsessing over quality. People who fell behind would be lambasted by their friends. It was great fun, high pressure, and during the course of our two festivals, we caused three novels to be written (each of more than fifty thousand words) and at least one of them wasn't complete rubbish (well done Tanya).

The content-managed, database-driven application that served as the website used for the second festival was a spectacular example of the amount of functionality that a single web developer can achieve in a weekend if they know that they can get it right while it still all fits in their head and that neither they nor anyone else will ever have to maintain it again afterwards. Funnily enough, the code code quality wasn't much worse than a Struts system he later came across on at a major Australian bank.

Anyway - all that was then and this is now. We're all busy with life now and there hasn't been momentum to run a festival for some time. If you're here it's more likely that you came to investigate the domain of its owner's email address then to read up about choristers writing fiction. So here are the links to sites related to him.

cratuki.blogspot.com - Latest and greatest blog.

songseed.com - The future home of a dot-com I'm working on.

songseed.org - Own projects.

sequencer - Notes about a framework I've been developing to allow business logic to hide behind an abstraction as elegant as the table/transaction/query/update convention used to control interaction with databases