. . . I'm also twittering on occasion. If you're bored or just need to buzz me, I can often be found at Nightwolfwriter.

I'm using Twirl for my twitter service. Keeps the footprint on my computer relatively small rather than tying up a tab on Firefox with the web version.

Not to worry. I will not be posting a twitterfeed here. God knows, it's bad enough they have to put up with my inane ramblings and questions over there.

I've noticed LJ lets you post your Skype account and your Yahoo IM account. Wonder when they'll catch up and let you post your twitter information?

This is it. The next-to-last weekend before I have to turn Shadows in to the editor. Trouble is, I was really unfocused tonight. Not necessarily unproductive, but unfocused. Just took longer to get what I did accomplished. I added 2021 words tonight in the new Chapter Seven. I'll try to finish it up tomorrow morning and then edit it on the metro if we wind up going to the Cherry Blossom festival tomorrow afternoon in D.C.

I haven't been to one for years and I'm thinking, if the weather holds out, it might be a lot of fun and a good way to recharge the ol' batteries for the last big push.

Also, I found a new web comic that I really enjoyed tonight. It's called The Dreamland Chronicles. It's a lot of fun and I really enjoy what the creator is doing with this one. I know some people are not fond of 3-D rendering in their comics, but for some reason, this one really works for me. Check it out and see what you think.

Not really much else to say outside of iTunes being stupid tonight. I'm not sure if it and Twitter don't play well together but I'm getting spikes on the CPU which are making iTunes really stutter and drag. Very odd. Didn't do this on the old laptop which had way less RAM. I'm thinking I may need to reload iTunes and see if it clears it out.

*sigh*
____________________________________________________________________________________

Words for Today

2021 / 1000 words. 202%

Progress on SG-1: Shadows of the Heart

83437 / 80000 words. 104%

Progress on Shadows of the Heart's revisons

6.67 / 25 chapters. 27%

Words for 2009

74933 / 365000 words. 21%

Been a bit since I posted. Sorry to disappear like that.

a) UCM lost in the NCAA Div II Final Four to the eventual national champions Findley (OH) University 67-65. Congrats to Findley for going 36-0 on the season. Well done.

b) Survived the daughter-unit's 16th birthday party over the weekend. Good part - everyone enjoyed themselves. Best part - over until next year.

c) Found out I did not get accepted into University of Baltimore's MFA program by logging into my student page and finding the message waiting there. Official word is supposed to come sometime this week. Will try and schedule a meeting with the Dept. Chair to see what I can do to improve my chances for next year. If I don't get in then, I'll just pass on the MFA. I'd be 55 if I get in next year. Any older than that and it shifts from being useful to vanity.

Yeah, that one stings a bit. Esp. since I have more pro credits than most of the instructors at the school, but I can't teach at the local JuCo without the Masters. Maybe I'll look into getting a straight MA in English instead.

d) I lost Monday because my old computer was just not enjoying life, so I have a new baby in the house. It's a cute little HP Pavillion dv7-1245dx Entertainment Computer. Let me tell you, that extra 2G of RAM is making this baby scream loading programs compared to the old Toshiba. The Toshiba would have probably been fine with XP on the machine, but Vista and it were NOT friends. Took a little bit to figure out how to move all the stuff from one machine to the other (esp. setting up Thunderbird as my mail client and getting it to talk to a recalcitrant mail server).

e) And speaking of pro cred, as you might note from the title of this blog entry, I have officially hit the end of Shadows this evening. Yes, I know I need to add another chapter and yes, I know it needs editing/rewriting and yes, I know the 13th is still right around the corner.

But, the first draft is done.

I finished Chapter 22 and then wrote a bridge chapter (currently Chapter 13b) which explains some of what happens in Chapter 21. Now to add in the new chapter and modify the chapters I've already identified to accommodate all the rest of the stuff I added in 20, 21 and 22. I'm quite convinced, the new stuff I have to add will push me well over what I needed for this book.

But still, it's nice to say, I'm in editing mode, not writing mode.

Note to self, never get this far behind on a project again or else push for a more reasonable delivery date.

And now, it's off to bed.
_______________________________________________________________________________

Words for the day

3810 / 1000 words. 381%

Progress on SG-1: Shadows of the Heart

78399 / 80000 words. 98% done!

Words for 2009

69835 / 365000 words. 19%

I was down Thursday-Sunday with some annoying bug so no writing done. We've had a death flu going through the office, but luckily I've managed to miss that so far. I just got run down and all I really wanted to do was sleep. So, all that wonderful time not at work and I didn't even get to enjoy it. Shazzbat.

I did manage to watch the Iron Man DVD with the family on Saturday though. We watched the extended/deleted scenes afterward and for once, I really didn't feel they made a mistake editing the movie. Sometimes, like say with the Harry Potter movies, I think some of the deleted scenes might have explained some things for non-fans better. However, with Iron Man, I think the deleted scenes would have changed the entire mood of the movie and not for the better. It's amazing what a few judicious edits/cuts can do to tighten the entire feel of a movie and make it flow . . . and why some movies desperately needed more/better editing.

I am seriously looking forward to the second one. *grin*

No real changes at work. Still hoping my job can get me placed on a new contract before Thanksgiving. I'm not worried about being unemployed (we have lots of work) but I hate being "on the bench". For tech writers, that tends to translate to "Hey, you're not doing anything, why don't you help us write this proposal?" O.K., it's an important thing for a business, but it's just not my cuppa.

However, now that I'm feeling better, I got some writing in this evening. I added 1106 words to Shadows of the Heart. I actually would have had more, but as I started working on the writing tonight, something was bugging me about a scene I wrote on Wednesday. So, I dug out Chapter Two and sure enough, I had re-hashed a scene I'd already written. *grrrrr* So, I had to burn up some writing time deciding how to edit the scene. Luckily, I think what I came up with works better, but I'd have rather added those words to the new stuff, not to replacing what I'd already written.

Oh, the joys of picking up a document five months later and trying to remember what you'd covered or not. Of course, my laptop is having problems connecting to the wireless printer, so I'm going to have to drop what I've written so far onto the thumb drive and take it to one of the other computers and print it from there. Have I mentioned I really hate Vista? Ever since I downloaded SP2, I've had nothing but problems with this laptop when it comes to wireless peripheral devices, Firefox 3 and other non-Windows programs. I think wishweaver and the daughter-unit had the right ideas going to Mac. Trouble is, I haven't finished paying this off yet, so it's not cost-effective for me to dump this quite yet.

When they said we had to suffer for our art, they failed to mention having to put up with Windows and Vista would be the main antagonist. *sigh*

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Words for Today

1106 / 1000 words. 111%

Progress on </i>SG-1: Shadows of the Heart</i>

7534 / 100000 words. 8%

Words for 2008

164329 / 366000 words. 45%

When I got into work this morning, I was informed that I was being transferred to one of my projects full time instead of splitting my time across two of them. Now, some people might have taken it the wrong way, but I think this is much better for all concerned. The project I'm on now is good at giving me specific deadlines and not worrying about things as long as I hit those deadlines. Plus, the manager I'm supporting is good at giving me very specific feedback to what he wants and doesn't want.

The other project, while interesting, was depending on me being more "self-motivating", which would be really cool if I was one of the developers or if I had been with the project from the beginning. However, as the tech writer, I have to work with the SMEs to develop the papers and I sorta need to know when they expect me to have them done. Otherwise, projects with no deadlines tend to slip so I can meet projects with clear deadlines. We were just a bad fit and while I'm pleased about the work I did for them, I can't say I'm heartbroken that "they don't have any work for me in the foreseeable future".

So, hopefully, with only having to answer to one manager, my stress level will go down and I can get back into the "I want to write when I get home" mode again.

And, in honor of this, I did write another 1000+ words on Harbinger of Darkness on my lunch break. I just didn't get a chance to type it in at home, so I can't officially count it on my word production for the day. I did, however, add 1616 words to Childhood's Tears tonight. I know I need to get started on the sekrit project soon, but after nights like this, it's going to be hard to put this one away to concentrate on the one that hopefully has real money attached to it.

In non-work/non-writing talk, I enjoyed going to see Prince Caspian with the family and dzeytoun. I enjoyed the story and some of the symbolism behind the various events. wishweaver and I have been discussing some of the different themes we saw in the movie and even if it's not "haute-cuisine" as far as movies go, if you're still talking about it a couple of days later, it's done it's job in my opinion.

Also, Daughter-unit is still geeking on her new computer and the manga drawing software she got, so we're counting this as "Mom and Dad did good." *grin*
____________________________________________________________________________________

Words for Today

1616 / 1000 words. 162%

Progress on Childhood's Tears

41343 / 90000 words. 46%

Words for 2008

145772 / 366000 words. 40%

After my daughter's appointments this morning, we hit the Apple store where she fell in love with the 20" iMac. We picked it up with some writing software (iWorks) and a Manga drawing software suite. She finished downloading all of her stuff from the old dying laptop after we got home and then after dinner tonight, we pulled the iMac out of the box, uploaded all of her stuff and started having fun with it. We're going to have to track down her WACOM drawing pad software to see if there's a Mac version or if it's universal software. Worst comes to worst, we'll just have to try and contact WACOM and have them send her a new CD. She's still having too much fun with her new "shiny" to worry about the drawing pad for the moment.

Of course, wishweaver fell in love with it too, but that's a purchase for another day . . . way far away. I never saw her as a Mac user, but Microsoft Vista is definitely pushing her toward it. Let's just say, its unreliabiliity is only exceeded by its memory-hogging slowness. I have a feeling we'll be blowing Vista off of her desktop soon and replacing it with XP. Hell, I'm thinking about doing the same with this laptop. Vista was NOT a better idea, Bill.

After all that, I uploaded my Bach collection into iTunes and prepared to write. That's where I hit a wall. I don't know why, but I just couldn't get into writing tonight. Maybe I'm already looking ahead to starting the sekrit project or maybe I was having too much fun visiting my old novel yesterday, but it was tough getting into the Chronicles tonight. So, after about two and a half hours, (most spent doing stuff other than writing), I finally logged 1,187 words. They're not bad words, and they were starting to come faster and better toward the end, so I'm encouraged by that.

Perhaps things will feel better after a good night's sleep.
_________________________________________________________________________________

Words for Today

1187 / 1000 words. 119%

Progress on CSD: Dragon Couchant

92550 / 120000 words. 77%


Words for 2008

144156 / 366000 words. 39%

Came home from a boring day at work to find out that wishweaver and the daughter-unit had just gotten home from getting a bite to eat. The D-U decided she was in for the night, so Wish and I took off to go do "something". She joined me while I grabbed a quick bite to eat and then we wandered over to the pet store to get cat "supplies" and then off to Staples. The chair I've been using upstairs was slowly dying (it was a Target special that came with a relatively cheap computer desk), so I got a nice new chair with good back support and she picked up a FM tuner for her iPod, so I can recover mine. *grin*

We weren't quite ready to go home, so we went up to the local mall and wandered around doing some window shopping. We're going to be taking D-U back to the mall tomorrow with us, since we've made an appointment at the Apple store. The D-U has been using my old laptop (and I mean old, I think I got this one back in 1999 or 2000) and it's seen better days. Since she's really getting into art, especially doing art on her computer drawing tablet, Wish and I thought getting her a Mac might be the way to go. We talked to one of the associates and we're leaning toward a 24" iMac for her, but we'll let D-U make the decision (within reason) since she'll be the one using it.

Yes, we're a Windows family for the moment, but the art world belongs to Apple (plus we can install Windows on the Mac if we decide to not upgrade a few of her programs to the Mac versions). I have to admit, I've been tempted by the Macbook Air, but I need to get a lot more use out of my Toshiba before I consider buying any more computer equipment for myself.

Did I mention it was a slow day at work? I took advantage of the situation and wrote 2,372 words today. Of course, they were words for the new version of Harbinger of Darkness, but this new first chapter is insisting on getting written sooner than later. So, since I didn't have anything to add to Shattered Mirror tonight, I transcribed the pages I brought home with me, edited some sentences, added some stuff here and there and generally enjoyed getting to visit with my girl, Raven.

Tomorrow, I hope to get some writing done on Chronicles. I know Wish has college stuff to do and D-U may be playing with her new toy. (She's already talking about what she can do with Garage Band and iMovie, sheesh!) That may be my cue to slip out and hit the local coffee shop for a bit.

Ulterior motives? Me? I'm shocked, shocked you could make such an accusation.

(Your winnings, monsieur. Thank you, Andre.)
_____________________________________________________________________________

Words for Today

2372 / 1000 words. 237%

Progress on Harbinger of Darkness rewrite

2372 / 110000 words. 2%

Words for 2008

142969 / 366000 words. 39%

Ouch.

I finally finished the first of two web redesigns I have to do at work. Well, actually, I had finished it at 1030 this morning except for one thing . . . I wanted a nice little rollover that would present a drop down menu to three sub-pages. Sounds simple, right?

Wrong

I fought this thing six ways from Friday. I wound up with two java programmers at my desk along with me trying to suss out why it worked perfectly on Firefox and not at all on IE. Now, if we had the code all by itself, it worked perfectly but it wouldn't work in the spaghetti code the previous author had left me. (Turns out it was harvested from someone else who wrote it back in 2002, so I have no clue what modifications have been made since then.) We finally fixed all the miscellaneous bugs, copied the appropriate code to all the other pages and finished the web redesign at 4:48. Yep. Almost six and a half hours to add a little piece of code to show a drop down menu consisting of three links.

Methinks there was a better way to do this, but that's the price one pays for going for the elegant solution instead of the simple one.

Got home and after dinner, I got ready to help edit wishweaver's term paper. Of course, the printer took the opportunity to die on us right then. Needless to say, this was an inopportune time for this to happen, especially with only dedicated computer store near us (CompUSA) having gone out of business a few weeks ago. We decided to chance Staples before moving on to the other box stores and as luck would have it, they were having a $50 rebate if you brought in an old HP printer (which we had) and bought a new HP printer (which we did).

That disaster was averted and Wish's paper was edited post-haste. I'll re-edit it tomorrow night and then she'll be done with term papers for this semester at least. It's a pretty good paper on Identity Theft and she's done a good job with her sources as well as explaining some ways to mitigate the damage if it occurs. I think she'll do pretty well with this.

I was afraid I wouldn't feel like or have time to write, but I managed to slip in a little over an hour's worth. Added 1032 words to Childhood's Tears and am getting ready to transition into Act II. At least, that's going relatively well.

Now, I get to get started on two major writing projects at work that I've been putting off to work on the web site. Yippie-skippie.

Oh, and I'm taking the daughter-unit into school tomorrow, so I get to wake up an hour and a half earlier than I usually do. *wheee!*
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Words for Tonight

1032 / 1000 words. 103%

Progress on Childhood's Tears

28022 / 90000 words. 31%

Words for 2008

90313 / 366000 words. 25%

The title pretty much describes my day at work.

I finished off the last two little assignments I had as well as making up the weekly status reports that didn't get turned in on Friday because I was here babysitting the appraiser. Poured myself a second cup of coffee and prepared to hit one of the big assignments I have staring at me.

And that's when my friend, Mr. Microsoft Word, began acting up on me again.

First off, the headings styles were acting up. I went into the style formatting, set up the numbering system exactly the way I wanted it and what happened? Word numbered my headings the way IT wanted them to look. It didn't matter if I set the numbers, if I went in and told it to restart the numbering, if I went in and manually set the numbers . . . Microsoft Word blithely ignored me and did whatever the hell it wanted.

But, that was only the beginning of its tricks.

After I finally got the headings almost exactly where I wanted them . . . I got the infamous, "Microsoft Word has encountered an unexpected error and will be shutting down" box.

Not once.

Not twice.

Six times . . .

. . . in a row.

I finally had to shut down my machine and restart it, hoping it would clear whatever was making the persnickety Word program so upset. At least when it came back up, I got a little smarter. I grabbed the document that I did have set up the way I wanted and carefully cut and pasted the words from the body of the offending document into the clean version and then just re-wrote the heading titles by hand rather than importing any bad formatting into the good document.

So far, so good.

But by then, I had squandered a lot of the afternoon and damn near all my desire to work on this particular document any more today. I have a meeting with the team leader about this tomorrow and hopefully when I return to my desk, armed with clearer guidance (I hope), I'll give it another try. However, if it keeps screwing up, I'll probably have to call our IT guys and see if they have any suggestions besides mine, which would be to wipe Word off my machine and give me a fresh reload. (I have to use Word, it's on the baseline and the government is unlikely to spring for a Word Perfect X3 license to make a lowly contractor happy.)

Still, even with the frustrations at work today, I still was in a better mood tonight than I have been in a while. Spent some good time with my family and then wandered upstairs to write. I may have piddled around on some blogs and web sites longer than I needed to, but I still added 1027 words to Childhood's Tears tonight. I'm happy with what I wrote and I hope to add quite a bit more tomorrow night.

And not a crash in sight. Thank you, WP X3. *grin*

Oh, and I also worked on a pitch for a possible ghostwriting project. I'm not adding the words tonight since they're still in pencil and not on the computer, but hopefully I'll be typing them up tomorrow night before my regular writing session. And I do need to start to work on my slides for the Writer Beware presentation I'm giving to the Maryland Writer's Association in May.

*wibble*
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Words for Today

1027 / 1000 words. 103%

Progress on Childhood's Tears

25826 / 90000 words. 29%

Words for 2008

81991 / 366000 words. 22%

OK, maybe not, but it felt like a rassenfrassen voyage of discovery, anyway.

I finally split my professional e-mail away from my Yahoo account. Since I made my (entirely too far out-of-date) website, I've just routed any mail from www.nightwolfgraphics.com to my Yahoo account. I figured it was just easier to have one site to go to check mail. I created a hotmail account for any on-line registration stuff I had to do, anticipating all of that would wind up in the spam realm anyway. However, the Yahoo account is drawing more and more spam to it (actually, more than the hotmail one to my surprise).

So, I've left the info@ and webmaster@ still directed to the Yahoo beast and have officially moved my r underscore white at nighwolfgraphics dot com mail to the Thunderbird e-mail client (and soon will be moving the mail addressed to the newly purchased richardcwhite dot com domain also - go me!)

However, being mostly IT inept, it wasn't quite as easy as that.

It took forever to get the server user name right . . . then there were problems setting up the authentication, then getting the ports right, then . . .

Well, there's a reason I married a computer scientist. *grin*

Still, being the old-school hacker that I am, I kept poking away at it figuring I'd either get it right or else bust it and then I'd just have to reload Thunderbird and start again. Took me about an hour and a half, but it's done now, so I have an official by God mail client for professional purposes and the Yahoo client which can be used for darn near anything else I want.

Perhaps lots of work for what appears to be little gain, but I'll take my victories where I can get them.

Work, to be polite, has been a real pain in my fourth point of contact lately and today was no exception. I was pretty whupped by the time I got home so I had to make a decision. I could write or I could finish preparing my "Collecting Anime Cels" panel for NASFiC. But, there wasn't enough energy to do both.

*pondering* Hmm, work on a project with no real deadline or work on a project that's due in three days. */pondering*

So, once again showing that even a computer idiot like myself can work in Adobe, I began editing the fourteen cels I'd scanned into the system yesterday. I think they turned out pretty well and I've added them into the slide show presentation for the convention. I am bringing my actual cels with me simply because if I don't, the convention center will certainly have no A/V support for my panel. (Murphy was an optimist, I'm convinced after these past two weeks at work.) It'll be harder to do the panel with hard copy instead of projected images, but better something than nothing.

Course, no one could show up for the panel . . . but that's another gremlin sitting on my shoulder cackling.

Still, it's done. All I have to do is upload it onto my Sony UX-290P and a thumb drive for back-up and I'm as ready for this panel as I can be.

Keep your fingers crossed that I don't run into a degausser between here and St. Louis. *grin*

Sorry I haven't posted much. Apparently, my computer was beyond resuscitation, so I haven't had much opportunity to get any new writing done. Also, working an average of 9.5 hour days the past two weeks hasn't left me with much energy to try and and sneak in too much time on wishweaver's laptop.

But, we dealt with that today. I decided since I have my Sony UX-290P palmtop computer for conventions and such, I didn't need to get a lightweight (read "more expensive") laptop. So, I am now the proud owner of a Toshiba Satellite with 2GB of RAM and a 250GB HD. With a quarter of a terrabyte to play with, it's going to be a while before I fill this puppy up.

I've loaded most of the software I need on it tonight and tomorrow, we move all the files from the Sony to the Toshiba and I get back to writing (as well as finishing my preparations for the "Collecting Anime Cels" panel at NASFiC). So, with any luck, I should have words to post tomorrow.

Well, the rest of my vacation didn't exactly go according to any plans . . . much less mine.

Wednesday went pretty well. I wrote that morning and spent the evening visiting with my friend, Tee Morris. We discussed writing, family, and different types of beers. Tried a nice one called Tres Pistoles, a dark belgian ale . . . very tasty. I definitely recommend it.

Tee and I come at writing from different directions. He's written several novels (quite good ones, in my opinion) as well as writing for Wiley Press (Podcasting for Dummies and the follow-up coming soon). However, his publisher doesn't have the distribution to get him into a lot of stores. I've done a lot of work and had decent sales, but so far, I haven't had anything original published (all media tie-in work so far). We're like opposite sides of the same coin. Still, it's fun to talk about our different experiences and goals as writers.

Thursday was my birthday, so that was a no-writing day.

Friday started out pretty well. Until water got spilled on my laptop. *sigh* Here's hoping it's going to dry out and start working again. Right now, the b key is inoperative, the touch pad is shot and typing any other key starts the b key (typing continuous lines of b's, making it impossible to write, use the internet, etc.). I'm hoping it'll eventually dry out, because the shop wants $209 just to look at it (apparently spills aren't covered under the warranty) and if I have to replace the keyboard or the motherboard, it goes up exponentially. *double sigh* So for now, I'm using wishweaver's laptop and debating on whether its worth the effort to fix or simply replace mine. Bleah.

Saturday, we had a friend of my daughter's over and then Wish was out for a while, so I didn't get to leave for Shore Leave until about 10pm. Still got to visit with kradical, terri_osborne, bill_leisner, tiggeralyn, daytonward and a host of other Trek authors. Lots of good conversations and definitely not enough time to visit with everyone.

Sunday, we had mollymorrison, sorentenshi, and dzeytoun over to go see the Order of the Phoenix. Well, they got to see it. I kept my daughter company at the mall since she didn't want to see it and I'm not quite comfortable turning her loose in the mall for three hours on her own, quite yet. Yeah, I'm a nervous dad, so sue me.

So, not much writing done with all this going on. Still, I think the basic experiment went pretty well. I'm convinced if I were to get to a point where I'm working part-time and writing part-time, I could set up a schedule and stick to it fairly well.

We'll just have to see what the future holds.

Let's just say things are a little quiet at work. There are eight of us at work in an office that normally is staffed with about twenty-five. It seems that everyone took Thursday/Friday off with the 4th falling mid-week. Plus, a number of people from my company at the other building are out also. Even the dining facility was a piece of cake to get through, all things considered.

Now, that doesn't mean I had nothing to do, since the system decided to play with my mind today, acting up for no reason and then restoring itself without any outside assistance. Which is probably just as well, since there were damn few people available to work on them if I had needed assistance.

Personally, I think the system just likes screwing with my head.

So . . . even though it was quiet, there was just enough required activity that I couldn't sneak in any writing at work today. But, I did get some done this evening after we got back from wandering about the mall this evening. Had to go drool on some new laptops. Not that I'm in a hurry to get rid of this one, but eventually, even the good ones call it a career and I might as well have a player on deck, just in case.

O.K., let's stop the crappy baseball analogies and get to the word count.

Night, L.J.

Words for today

1,081 / 1,000 (108.1%)

Progress on Dragon Couchant

45,792 / 100,000 (45.8%)

Words for the year

51,332 / 365,000 (14.1%)

Wow, I'm not sure what happened today, but I darn sure wish I could bottle it. Although I slept in this morning, once we got back from a damn fine Indian Buffet (*yum*), I slipped behind the computer and began writing.

Took some breaks to help wishweaver resetting up her computer and finding out it was doing the same darn thing again that it had been at the computer shop for twice already. Finally, we just wiped everything with the recovery disk and so far, so good. The intermittent re-booting seems to have stopped and she's been able to reload most of the stuff on her computer that she wants. Also helped out hauling laundry up from the basement to the upstairs bedrooms with the daughter-unit. But, for the most part I was able to just sit and write today.

I don't know if today is a personal high, but it's certainly close to being one of the high points for 2007. 2651 words were added to the Chronicles today as well as setting the basis for Act Two in this story. While I still envision Chronicles as a three book series (Dragon Couchant, Dragon Guardant and Dragon Rampant), the first book needs to be a complete stand-alone story by itself, just in case the other two don't get sold.

I like to think of it as the Star Wars method of writing trilogies. Star Wars - definite ending although there were some threads unresolved (rebels still fighting empire, Darth Vader surviving, etc.). Empire Strikes Back - everything goes to hell in a hand basket for the heroes and a definite cliff-hanger ending. (Much weeping and gnashing of teeth ensued when I realized there was no resolution and I "had" to come back for part three if I wanted to know what would happen to our intrepid crew. I cursed George Lucas's name greatly in the years between 2 and 3 (the real 2 and 3).) Return of the Jedi - threads resolved, guy gets the girl, bad guys dealt with and big finale to wrap everything up. (Much less taking Lucas's name in vain, although I think I'm one of the few people who liked the Ewoks - I recognized the tribe vs. civilization fight that has been fought since pre-Roman times.)

This is how I think trilogies should be done. Give me a good solid story with a satisfying conclusion in the first book and I'll eagerly seek out anything else using those characters in that world. Even if Brian Dailey hadn't put out Starfollowers of Coromonde, I loved Doomfarers of Coromonde. It didn't need the second book to make the first enjoyable, but having enjoyed the first book, it made the second book not only enjoyable, but comfortable . . . like coming home.

But, getting back to my stuff, I'm working to make Dragon Couchant a good stand-alone story, that just happens to tie into the next two books. Course, that presupposes that I get around to finishing it. *sigh*

Words for today

2,651 / 1,000 (265.1%)

Progress on Dragon Couchant

44,771 / 100,000 (44.8%)

Words for the year

50,251 / 365,000 (13.8%)

I haven't finished installing everything back onto the computer yet.

Still need to hook up the iPod and salvage what I can from my iTunes library. Will have to go out and resubscribe to all the podcasts I've been listening to, but that'll give me a chance to decide which to keep and whether to try some new ones.

Need to swing by the college tomorrow and hope they haven't shipped my WordPerfect X3 back. Just found out it arrived a couple of weeks ago. *eek!*

I'm hoping by after tomorrow, I'll almost be back to where I was before this problem arose.

(keeping fingers crossed)

But unfortunately, that's not the case.

We've been performing triage on my computer most of the evening. Looks like we're going to have to reformat and reload it. There's obviously some stuff on the computer that's not supposed to be there and it's probably not worth the time and effort to search out each possible hiding place and blow it out. Not exactly what I want to do, but I have my recovery disks here and all my software disks standing by.

Just going to be a drag to have to reload Firefox and all the add-ons and stuff that I like and the fact that I'm going to lose my iTunes library. Luckily, nothing I had paid for and I should be able to recover a lot of what I had from my iPod, but I know I've uploaded about 20 CDs since last time I resynched my pod that I'll have to redo. (Snarl, growl).

And the sad thing is I practice safe hex, run my anti-virus, spy-bot checker, trojan detectors, have my firewall and still something slips by when a friend's kid goes surfing on this machine without my knowledge. If the people who write malware would put half as much effort into doing good not evil, there's probably no end to the things they could accomplish.

Hopefully, I'll be back on line in a day or two.

Checking in after a very nice holiday.

Started out this morning with the opening presents ritual.

As usual, the daughter-unit made out like a bandit *grin*. Her big item was her digital tablet so she can start doing her art on the computer. There's going to be a learning curve, no doubt, but she's pretty excited about it. We didn't get a "top-of-the-line" one, but we got a pretty solid one. If she decides to stay with her art, we'll see about upgrading, but I want to know this isn't a "passing thing" before I expend serious bucks on things like that. Course, prying her away from her boxed set of "A Series of Unfortunate Events" was pretty tricky in its own right.

Even though I knew most of what I was getting, it was certainly worth getting up for today. The main new toy for me was the Sony Vaio UX-280P, the smallest laptop that Sony makes. Some might say it's a PDA on steroids since it's primarily run by a stylus, although it does have a tiny keyboard (have to learn how to thumb type). It's Bluetooth and wireless capable with a web-cam built in. This is going to be my convention laptop, where I can bring my various notes and uploaded files/pictures for the panels I'm on, and still get a little writing done.

I'll need to borrow a portable CD/DVD player from mollymorrison when she gets back from California to load WordPerfect on it (it only comes with Microsoft Works . . . yuck), as well as other software that I may need. Plus, I need to get it set up on the family wireless lan as well as figuring out which Cingular wireless plan I want to add to it. The guys at the Cingular store recommended that I just move my sim card from my cell phone to the computer if all I'm going to do is use its wireless capability one weekend a month or so, but I'm a little leery of that. We'll have to figure out the battle plan after I get more familiar with the machine.

Here's a picture of the critter:


In addition, I picked up a 160GB external hard drive that all three of us are going to use to store back-up files, especially of our music and photos that are currently on the computer hard drives, I got some new CDs, to include the Mediaeval Babes Christmas album, the Star Trek Golden Key Collection Vol. 1, an assortment of my favorite candies and a HUGE tabletop book called Cosmos: A Field Guide by Giles Sparrow. Lots of great pictures from Hubble, Cassini, and other various deep space telescopes. I just had time to glance through it earlier today, but it's easily the largest book I've ever owned as far as height and width goes. It adds new meaning to "coffee table" book, as with a few legs, it could be a coffee table.

Spent the afternoon with our friends April and Mark and had a very nice visit/meal there. I was a little nervous about the trip given all the rain that was coming down and the temperature hovering around 41 degrees. I had visions of the temperature dropping with the onset of night and the roads potentially freezing with us an hour from home, but, when we left this evening, the temperatures had gone up to 45 degrees, so the trip home was a lot more relaxing.

Not really looking forward to going to work in the morning, but I do like getting paid, so I probably should wrap it up now. I hope everyone's Christmas brought them what they wanted.

Well, I took the night off last night to do some other maintenance stuff I've been putting off trying to get this synopsis off to the agent. sorerutenshi and mollymorrison helped me with scanning in part of my anime cel collection onto the computer. I managed to get 56 of my cels done last night but I have quite a bit more to go.

However, I noted the new scanner doesn't seem to scan small narrow pictures very well. It was cropping them at weird places or only scanning one of two images. I'm going to have to spend some time with the new scanner to see if there's a workaround for this. Highly frustrating.

Once I get them all scanned in, I need to put together a slide show for Archon (and other conventions) to talk about collecting and taking care of anime cels, how they're made, etc. I've done this small panel/coffeehouse about cels for a couple of years, but I hate having to haul my cels with me to conventions. Maybe I'm a bit paranoid, but why take chances? So, hopefully this year, I'll have them all scanned in and put on a disc. That way, either I can bring my laptop and show them in a coffeehouse setting (group around a table) or else the convention will provide A/V equipment and we'll project them in the panel room.

It was nice doing something other than writing for an evening. However, now I have to spend today and tomorrow finishing my college writing and then on Monday, back to the grindstone to touch up a couple of Harbinger spots and then get started on the next project.

(Oh yeah, spend a little time on e-Bay looking for some new cels . . . ;) )

Well, this weekend is getting off swimmingly.

I turned on my computer and my Spybot Search and Destroy decided all my cookies and all my bookmarks were spyware and ate them.

All of them.

(sound of head creating divot in table)

So, I'm going to have to recreate (and hopefully remember) where I found around 200 bookmarks.

(Sound of VERY heavy sigh)

The bad part was there were a number of odd little space sites I'd found to use for Star Trek ideas that I have no clue where I found them. You know, those sites you run across, bookmark and then use the bookmark but don't really pay attention to "where" that site is. Yep. One of those situations.

arrrrggghhh!!!!

We now return you to your weekend already in progress.