Yesterday afternoon I uploaded a song called Hidden Consciousness to the FAWM website, and that makes five tracks I've written and recorded since the challenge started on Saturday. So with almost half the challenge still to run, I've already hit the target. It feels like I've got plenty left in the tank as well, so I will be heading back to my bedroom studio later today to work on song number six.

For track number five I decided that I was going to use some of the many instruments which I've collected over the years which run in Native Instruments' venerable old sampling engine, Kontakt. I have the full version of Kontakt, not just the free player that has rather restricted functionality, and I've bought some very useful premium packs for it over the years such as the Pripyat Pianos from Strix Instruments, which you can hear on my latest recording. I've also gathered lots of free instruments, because there's a thriving community of people making sounds for it and most of them do so just for the fun of doing so.

Okay, when I typed "lots" just then, that doesn't really convey just how enthusiastically I've embraced collecting quirky, free instruments from providers scattered around the globe; I happened to notice how many sounds I'd got available yesterday, and it was rather more than I thought I had: the browser had found 25,873 individual .nki files.

I should be able to find something else in there to inspire me, right?

Making music is helping to take my mind off other things at the moment. I've noticed a general improvement in my mood over the past week or so and having people say nice things about the work I'm doing always lifts my spirits. Some of the comments I've received this week have made me very happy.

I think that for next month's Bandcamp Friday I'm going to release an album of my favourite songs from this summer's song sprints. I won't dump everything out there; not all of the stuff I've produced since June is worthy of a release, but the song I recorded yesterday deserves to remain available after the FAWM website goes back into hibernation before the end of the month, and so do many of its fellows—at least as far as I'm concerned, anyway.

Listening back to my recent work on headphones last night, I noticed that a few tracks could benefit from remixing as well as some very minor touching up. Most of them took less than four hours to make from start to finish, after all; the focus is on getting the songs finished, but not necessarily radio-ready (although because I'm me, I do try to get them as close to that state as I can in a single session). But I should have plenty of time to do the necessary polishing before the end of the month. And it's long past time that the album in the page header here got a refresh, too. It's been there since April. For someone as prolific as I usually am, that feels like an eternity...

I'm sticking with Robert Fripp's practice of morning sitting which I started last month. I've been fascinated by how variable the experience is. On some days I float gently through the half-hour with a Zen-like calm so that it feels like I've been still for less than five minutes but on others, like this morning, I struggle to find any equilibrium at all. I sit there with my nerves jangling, I can't still the inner voices, and when I perform Mr Fripp's "body scan" I realise how jittery I am. The difference in the ease with which I can make small deliberate movements with the fingers of my left and right hands is scary. The right is relatively smooth and I feel like I'm in charge; the left hand seems to have a lot of glitches in it, particularly when I'm moving the second, third and fourth fingers. My fine motor control is abysmal and they spasm and jerk violently in a way that completely overwhelms the movements that I intended to make. This is nothing new; I've had a persistent tremor in that hand for more than thirty years now. It's only since I realised that I'm Autistic that I have figured out that it's probably one of the many symptoms of the condition, or at least the result of the non-standard way in which my brain is wired. Well, that, or the PTSD. No wonder I've always struggled with playing fast licks on the guitar.

I've mentioned before that stimulants seem to have the opposite effect on me compared to normal people. Perhaps I should have waited for my breakfast coffee to kick in before I sat down this morning. I had a rough night last night, and I'm really feeling the effects of not getting enough sleep today. I'm still laying off the painkillers and toughing out the aches and pains, and last night was a bit of an ordeal. But I've been feeling unsettled for the whole month so far. The world is in such a mess at the moment that it's difficult to pin down any one thing as the root cause.

I think I'm going to stay away from the news media entirely today. The antics of the far-right are doing nothing for my peace of mind. I keep telling myself that the grown-ups will be along soon to sort everything out, but each time someone promising arrives on the scene, they soon show themselves up as being just as hopeless as their predecessors. Yes, I'm looking right at you, Prime Minister.

The FAWM song sprint has been running for less than two days as I write this but I've already got two songs posted on my profile page there. I'm quite pleased with how they turned out, although neither of them ended up anywhere close to my intentions when I fired up Ableton and created a new set. That's part of the fun of songwriting for me. I have lost count of the number of times that a song has suddenly and very decisively set off in a completely different direction to the one I had planned. Quite a few of my fellow fawmers have been talking about songs having minds of their own in our Slack channel, and I totally get what they mean.

I'm going to spend the rest of the day working on song number three. But first, I need to update some more of my plugins, which helpfully told me yesterday that new versions were available to download.

The FAWM website will let people post their contributions to this month's Song Sprint from 1 pm BST this afternoon, and as soon as I've posted this blog entry I'll be heading into my home studio to see what I can come up with. Yesterday I made sure that all my gear was running smoothly but although I updated Kontakt 8 to its latest version, I managed to resist the temptation to install Audacity 4 (and my goodness, that's a terrible web page).

August was a quiet month for me, creatively speaking. I've spent most of the last six weeks working on other things—not that I'm complaining about that at all; I was doing stuff for other people, and I'm very grateful to have been asked to do so. But as I noted last month, as of late it feels like my muse has been neglecting me. I'm hoping that if I just assume she's going to show up later today, that's exactly what she'll do.

But even if she doesn't, I'll just carry on and do the work regardless. Because it turns out that this is actually the trick to getting creative work done (and not just when a deadline is involved, either). It's the reason why I've ended up recording more than 1500 pieces of music since I first signed up for February Album Writing Month back in 2009. You have to do the work.

I seem to have had a really good night's sleep again. My fitness app tells me my resting heart rate dropped to 48 bpm and I slept all the way through the night. As a result, my "sleep score" this morning was a very satisfactory 98.

I think there are a number of reasons why I managed to do this besides keeping the bedroom windows closed, which I mentioned below. The most obvious one is that I've not been drinking alcohol this week. Normally I'd have opened a bottle of wine on a Friday evening and slobbed out in front of the TV but yesterday I'd switched to a glass of cranberry juice and read books. Another recent change to my lifestyle is giving up my Friday night pizza (yes, I know, it's really sad and I'm grateful for your sympathy). Last night I had a much healthier stir fry instead, heavy on the vegetables (bamboo shoots and water chestnuts) with a few pieces of chicken. I'm still avoiding taking painkillers as well; that's more of a challenge, as after half an hour of practising bass yesterday, I'm pretty sore this morning.

But when I stood on the scales this morning and discovering that I'd continued my streak of losing weight rather than putting some of it back on again, it was a very nice surprise. Am I feeling the benefits of all this? Well, not so much.

The FAWM website is open for business again and beginning on Saturday, I will be attempting to write five brand new songs in nine days for the latest Song Sprint. As this one starts on 9/5 (at least, it does if you live in the United States) we're calling this one the Dolly Sprint as a small tribute; the site has been bedecked with butterflies and purple. And as far as advice for all budding songwriters goes, I can't think of anything better than that from Dolly herself: "Find who you are. And do it on purpose."

It's Bandcamp Friday again tomorrow. I'd toyed with the idea of putting together a new release for it, because it's been quite a while since I updated my discography there, but this week I just haven't had enough spoons available. Next week will be a good opportunity to write some new material for one or other of the projects I'm working on at the moment. They're progressing slowly, but they are progressing.

But for now I'll have to wait until the next Bandcamp Friday. Which is next month, I believe.

The physics world is buzzing this week after UCSB (the University of California in Santa Barbara) reported an intriguing interaction in their LUX-ZEPLIN detector which suggests that they may have detected a WIMP for the first time. The Large Underground Xenon - ZonEd Proportional scintillation in LIquid Noble gases experiment (LZ for short) is basically a giant bucket containing seven metric tonnes of incredibly pure liquid xenon, lined with photoelectric detectors which pick up the light emitted when something with a lot of energy enters the detector, hits a xenon atom, and interacts with it, releasing a photon. LZ has been been finely tuned to detect interactions with theoretical objects called Weakly Interacting Massive Particles or WIMPS, which are one of the prime candidates for explaining dark matter, an invisible something which makes up roughly 27% of everything in the Universe that has never been directly observed before (that's why it's dark). The stuff that we can see, which you and I are made of, makes up just 5% of the total mass/energy in the Universe. It's called baryonic matter because its principal constituents are baryons like protons and neutrons, which are both made up of subatomic particles called quarks. Things like electrons and neutrinos, which aren't made of quarks, are called leptons; they are much lighter but they're still observable to current science. (Yes, physics is complicated.)

Galaxies spin, and they spin so fast that if they were only made with regular matter, they'd fly apart. The gravity from something that has a lot of mass but which is invisible must be holding them together. There are also accumulations of matter of some sort out there which are so massive that their gravity bends light from things like galaxies that are behind them. Again, we can't actually see what it is that does this; it doesn't interact with light and is therefore invisible. That's dark matter.

Up until the closing years of the last century, cosmologists thought that gravity would be slowing down the expansion of the Universe which resulted from the Big Bang, but they were rather surprised to discover from observations of distant galaxies that the opposite was true; the expansion is actually accelerating. Dark energy is the best theory available at the moment that explains this. It's just as mysterious as dark matter, and it's thought to make up the remaining 62% of everything there is. Cosmology is weird.

Dark matter and dark energy explain the way that the Universe behaves in a way that can't be accounted for if the baryonic matter we can see is all there is. A single detection isn't going to change physics overnight, of course; more data is required before what just happened is accepted as evidence that WIMPs are real (right now, the result has a statistical significance of 2.6 sigma, meaning that there's about a 0.5% chance that it's just a fluke of background noise. Remember when the discovery of the Higgs Boson was announced, back in the day; science requires a 5 sigma result for something like this to be accepted as fact). But it's certainly a very interesting announcement.

When I woke up on Wednesday morning I was rather surprised to discover that it was after eight o'clock. I'd slept right through the night, and according to my watch my resting heart rate dropped down to 47 bpm in the small hours of the morning. I was really out for the count. Last night my pulse dropped to 51 bpm, and I didn't feel quite as groggy when I woke up, but I was still very grateful for my breakfast coffee.

What's made the difference to the quality of the sleep I'm getting seems to be keeping my bedroom windows closed. I'm pretty sure that what was waking me up was my neighbours setting off for work, although the fact that during the summer it gets light here by five in the morning certainly didn't help matters. Now that it's autumn, it doesn't get light until six. The weather's cooled down too, so it's not been necessary to keep the windows open and last night I didn't even have the bedroom fan running.

I've also noticed the benefits of not taking any painkillers since the weekend. I hadn't been taking them every day, but they were beginning to be a habit, and that's really not good for you. I've still got aches and pains, but they're manageable. It's all part of the joys of getting old, I guess. Given the alternative, I'm fine with that.

Today is the first day of meteorological autumn. The summer's dry spell seems to be over for the moment, and the village got quite a bit of rain at the weekend. As we were heading over to Sunday's gig, my buddy Paul (who is the band's guitarist) asked me, "why does the air smell so nice when it rains?" and because I'm me, I was able to answer him with a single word: petrichor.

Actually, if I'd wanted to be scientifically accurate I'd have added a second word: geosmin, or (if you want to be really hip and get down with the chemistry kids) C₁₂H₂₂O. It's one of a family of aromatic oils called terpenoids and this particular substance is created in nature by a number of soil microbes but particularly a family called Streptomyces. A few years ago it was discovered that they do so in order to attract a species of invertebrates called springtails so that they will feed on them and distribute their spores.

Most humans love the smell and can detect it in concentrations as low as a few parts per trillion. As that first link notes, this is probably because finding sources of water by smell likely conferred a big evolutionary advantage (because you don't die of thirst). All the same, you wouldn't want it in your drinking water because it makes it taste of dirt and so most water treatment plants use carbon filtration in order to remove it.

Science, eh? All that, just from us smelling the air after a storm.

After a busy weekend (by my standards, anyway) I appear to be completely knackered. It was after ten before I managed to drag myself out of bed this morning and I'm really looking forward to my breakfast coffee (as I type this, I'm just waiting for the machine to heat up but as soon as I hear the noise it makes when it's ready, believe me when I say that the blog will immediately have to concede priority—ah, there it goes. I'll be right back.)

Even without painkillers (I'm going without them for a week, to see if I still can) I fell asleep unusually quickly last night. In fact I went out like a light. I still woke up at half-past five this morning for some reason, but after lying awake for for a half hour or so I managed to fall asleep again. And when I woke up again at 07:30 and told myself "I'll just close my eyes for another five minutes" I nodded off again for another good three-quarters of an hour.

Twice.

My watch therefore awarded me a very generous score of 97 this morning which should indicate a relaxed and restorative night. It doesn't feel like that's what I got at all. I'm still sore, although not as bad as I felt yesterday and I can still move about; the pain's not affecting my mobility very much, thank goodness. I think the tiredness is actually more of a neurodivergent thing than a physical thing. Spending a couple of evenings over the weekend in rooms that were full of people pushed me well outside what I've come to think of as my comfort zone, even if I was able to wear earplugs and focus on the job I was doing, of making the band sound as good as I possibly can. I need a few days to recharge after days like that because the older I get, the more I find them to be overwhelming. And I know that there's also an emotional side to how I'm feeling at the moment. After the highs of July's stay at Real World, a week hanging out with Helen last month, and celebrating my birthday, I've spent most of the last couple of weeks here at home on my own, decompressing.

Much as I love having company, I've realised that too much of it isn't good for me. After a while I stop being able to handle the additional stimulation and the TILT indicator in my brain will light up until I can spend some time on my own. The good news is that these days I know it's about to happen before it does so, and I can do something about it to limit how severely I shut down. The bad news is that needing to do so puts a lot of stress on a relationship and I think it's one of the main reasons why I've lived on my own for the past twenty years. Although I love all the abilities that my weirdly wired brain gives me, there are times when leading a rather more cosily "normal" home life sounds like it would be really nice. The sad thing is that I no longer think I'll ever have much chance of finding out what that would be like.