There is a handy tool init-checkconf you can use to validate your freshly written Upstart configs. If you're trying to use this on an Ubuntu server install or similar environment, you might have run into this issue:

The problem is that init-checkconf is assuming you have a dbus-daemon running and the related environment variables set to find it. A graphical login session generally will start a dbus session for the user, but on a server install you are most likely running without one.

I wrote a quick script for a coworker that wraps init-checkconf with a temporary dbus session. It might come in handy for someone else as well.