Actually, it's going to be a very busy next few weeks. I have four documents at work I need to have finished by 06 April and then the first draft of Shadows of the Heart is due at Fandemonium on 12 April. So, I predict a LOT OF WRITING in my future over the next six weeks. I am anticipating my stress level going through the roof during this time, but hey, the tech writing pays the bills so I can afford to actually write for myself.

At least, I have a new vice to go along with the stress. There's a store at the mall called Teavanna, and I found a very nice tea mixture that they were giving away samples of. It's a mixture of Samurai Chai Mate and White Ayurvedic Chai. It's a white tea with 100% the caffeine equivalent of coffee. So, now I can supplement the coffee IV with this stuff. Whoo hoo!!!!

Just got back from the auto body shop. The insurance adjuster agreed with the estimate so, in a week or so, my car goes into the shop for a few days. Here's hoping they don't spot any more damage while they're in there.

Of course, I nearly got creamed again today. I was turning left at a different intersection, but still two lanes go left here also. I was in the outside lane and as I made my turn, I noticed the car next to me was swinging INTO MY LANE from the interior lane. Luckily, there was a small shoulder, so I was able to duck and brake to get away from them. I caught up to them at the next light and the (insert curse word of choice) person was talking on her cell phone, completely oblivious to the fact she damn near took the front end off of my car.

GAAAAAHHH!!!!!

When I have the car in the shop, I'm going to ask them to see if they can find the idiot magnets in it and get rid of them.

We had company parts of the holiday weekend, so I didn't get as much writing done as I had hoped. The majority came in a trek to B&N on Sunday and then tonight. Still, I'm happy with the 5492 words and since there are no more three-day weekends between now and then, I'm hoping we can keep the distractions down to a minimum. The operative word is "hoping".

Oh, and if I didn't need another time sink, I've finally gone to the dark side and picked up a Twitter account. We'll see how long that lasts or if it becomes too much of a distraction. Still, if you're vaguely interested, you can either search for me or @nightwolfwriter.
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Words for Today (2 day total)

5492 / 2000 words. 275%

Progress on SG-1: Shadows of the Heart

21078 / 100000 words. 21%

Words for 2009

13524 / 365000 words. 4%

Open message to convention attendees:

When dining in a local restaurant, do not regale the other diners of the sexual innuendos you used when you were talking the guest of honor . . . even if you are a Browncoat. You also do not need to describe the following, con funk, toilet mishaps or smashing open smurf dolls lined with blood bags at the table either.

Remember, there's a fine line between "freaking the mundanes" and being an obnoxious asshole.

The Browncoats who left Farpoint and descended on the sushi restaurant in my home town managed to ruin not only my family's time there, but several other tables worth of guests, to judge from the looks on the diners' faces.

Behavior like that is one reason why attending cons is less and less fun. I don't need it following me to my front door.

Thanks.

Aggravated person.

After struggling with my writing on Thursday, I decided to take a night off from writing and read and do some other stuff. Went to the mall with wishweaver and bought some cool teas at Teavana. Wish had gotten some of their tea for her birthday and wanted to talk to them about brewing times and such and I spotted a few that looked rather interesting, so I indulged myself a little bit.

Today however, I got to deal with a different issue. Some idiot nearly rear-ended me when they merged onto the street I was on at a higher than necessary speed. (Driving like a bat out of hell) I had to punch the accelerator in my old 91 Toyota pickup to avoid being creamed. Luckily for me, the engine still has some pep in it and I barely managed to avoid the idiot. However, as I did, I heard a loud pop and then the noise started.

I was hoping I had just ruptured my muffler, but then the truck started staggering and I was really afraid I had done something bad to the truck. Yes, I do want to replace it, but no, I don't want to do it in an emergency (more or less) situation. I managed to limp the beast to Menike for service and they did their inspection. The guy came in and told me there was nothing wrong with the muffler. Let me tell you, my heart dropped because I was thinking I'd blown the engine somehow. Then he tells me, the O2 converter had blown out . . . literally. That's where all the engine noise was coming from, plus because it was gone, the engine couldn't regulate how much gas it needed, so it was alternating between too much and too lean. That's why it was running so rough. Whew. It wound up costing me about half what I was expecting and a whole lot less than I was afraid of.

Went to Ellicott City to pick up some t-shirts I had ordered from one of the shops there. I love "The Mountain" T-shirts. I have gotten several compliments for their "Fallen Angel" shirt I picked up a couple of years ago, so I picked up a few more for this year's convention season. Plus the shop I bought them in makes some of the best fudge in the state. Their "Tiger Butter" fudge is outstanding. *nom, nom, nom.*

I did get some writing in today. Spent some time with the Chronicles of the Sea Dragon, adding 1312 words. I had two of my protagonists nearly come to blows tonight. It'll be interesting to see how much pride was bruised over their exchange of words. (*evil writer, evil writer*)

Might have gotten some more done, but I wound up visiting with a good friend that I hadn't talked to for a while. Sometimes, you have to step away from the keyboard for life, and that's O.K., too.
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Words for Today

1312 / 1000 words. 131%

Progress on CSD: Dragon Couchant

87894 / 100000 words. 88%

Words for 2008

114294 / 366000 words. 31%

Finished Chapter Eight of Shattered Mirror this evening and sent it off to April for her critique. Hopefully, she'll have time to read through it before our regular Skype session, but if not, we'll work on it on line tomorrow. I only needed 563 words to finish the chapter. Probably should have finished it last night but there are lots of "probably should"'s in my past.

The Ft. Meade Science Fiction and Fantasy Club is spinning off a Writer's group and I've been working with the organizer to help him get it off on the right foot. I've been discussing things I've seen go wrong with other writer's groups as well as things done right. I also made it clear, I can't help out with fan fiction, but luckily, everyone seems all right with that.

Otherwise, it's been a pretty slow day. Work, haircut, dinner, writing. You know, the usual.

I also worked on Childhood's Tears this evening, adding 1041 words. Yeah, I know, not quite as productive as the weekend, *grin*, but not bad for a weeknight either.

(Course I might have gotten more done if I wasn't so interested in this asshattery. It was just two years ago, almost to the weekend that Lori Jareo made such a flaming fool of herself and now we can add Austin Torney to that pantheon. I'm just sitting back waiting for CBS/Paramount's lawyers to set their phasers to "frappe" and deal with this knucklehead.

Are people just trying to give publishers a reason to stamp out fan fiction or what?

I have to agree with daytonward's comment where he quotes Dave Galanter on another kerfluffle -
"Darmok, at the fan, when the shit hit."
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Words for Today

1604 / 1000 words. 160%

Progress on Shattered Mirror

563 / 563 words. 100%

Progress on Childhood's Tears

31129 / 90000 words. 35%

Words for 2008

107587 / 366000 words. 29%

Now, normally, I'm pretty proud of my membership in SFWA. Yeah, I know, I'm an anachronism, but I've been one all my life so why change now. I'm a proud member of Writer Beware and I believe we're doing some good on that committee.

However, something seriously wrong.

I was surprised when the Star Trek fan film "Worlds Enough and Time" appeared on the Nebula ballot. I thought it had to be a mistake. Sure, lots of things get nominated for the Nebula, but it had to get winnowed out. It's video fanfic for God's sake. Sure, it might be pretty darn good fanfic, but you know, I think wishweaver writes pretty damn good HP fanfic, and so does quillscribe, perivayne and a host of others and I'd never consider nominating them for a Nebula.

Why?

BECAUSE IT'S NOT RIGHT.

I can think of a lot of media tie-in works that probably could be (and should be) nominated. What's the difference, I hear the voice in the peanut gallery asking? Well, first off, it's approved by the license holder, it's vetted through editors and the licensor, it's properly copy edited and the publisher ensures it gets into bookstores around the country.

And the author gets a professional credit for doing the work and they get paid.

None of these things happen in fanfic. Now, I realize there are some professionals who're working with Star Trek:The New Voyages. That's all well and good. I know professional authors who write fanfic also. You don't see their fanfic getting nominated for Nebulas.

Now, I see this fan film has made the final cut for the Nebulas. This is an outrage.

It's not professional work, and if the producer is making money off this, I hope Paramount buries him or her. I remember how quickly Lori Jareo disappeared after Lucas brought out the 600 pound gorillas when she tried to sell "Another Hope".

I just have to hope that SFWA comes to its senses and damn quickly.

Otherwise, I'll have to see if I can work on Writer Beware without being a member of SFWA.

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.

OK, I didn't have a great weekend of writing. OK, I had a really bad weekend of writing.

We'll put that behind us and persevere from this point forward.

I made it to Virginia yesterday to pick up the daughter-unit although there were several times it was in doubt. There was just enough snow and ice on the roads to make things treacherous and I counted at least sixteen accidents between here and there. Might have been more than that on the way back, but in the growing darkness, it was hard to tell. What normally was a two hour round trip became the five and a half hour crawl.

The worst part was dealing with the idiots who decided their time was too important, so they were doing neat things like driving on the shoulders because the four lanes of traffic were moving at about fifteen miles an hour. Of course, these were the same people I passed later, standing out on the side of the road, looking at their now not-so-pretty car with a dumb look on their face like "How did that happen?" I really just wanted to roll down the window and smack them as I drove past. Idiots.

Got home, collapsed on the couch and if wishweaver hadn't called, I might have spent the night there.

Had a fairly good day at work, all things considered. Got some writing in during my lunch hour, as well as getting a letter from the first agent about Harbinger. I anticipate hearing something, one way or the other, in a few days. Keep your fingers crossed out there.

So, unlike last Friday, I am a bit more motivated now. I added another 1204 words to Redshift tonight and it looks like I'm going to go long on the first draft. (What, you're surprised? You must be a new reader.) Still, I'm pretty pleased with it and look forward to going back through it and having time to tighten it up before the deadline instead of rushing through it.

With tonight's addition, I'm 1,593 words behind schedule. Grrrr. Hopefully, I can make up some time this weekend to make up for my lack of motivation/illness this past one. Oh, to be able to type quickly.

Been reading The Myths and Legends of Japan and drooling at the thought of doing some fantasy set in Medieval Japan. Course, I do have some other projects in line first, but that's never stopped me from prepping and doing the world building ahead of time. Still, Chronicles of the Sea Dragon, Troubleshooters Incorporated and Shattered Mirror have to come first.

Curse my overactive imagination.

Words for Today

1,204 / 1,000 (120.4%)

Progress on Redshift

8,146 / 10,000 (81.5%)

Words for the Year

20,407 / 365,000 (5.6%)

Met with the Insurance adjusters. I'll be getting a new dash, new windows and window assembly for the sliding windows in the back of the truck, a new stereo (they're upgrading the stereo since they don't make the specific model that was stolen anymore - iPod docking station included *grin*) and a few other minor ins and outs.

I still need to contact a body shop to schedule all the work - but that's a job for the weekend.

So, I'm out the $200 deductible, but all in all, I think I'm coming out ahead (counting the B&D electric screwdriver and the crowbar the thieves left behind). The insurance adjuster was amused about that.

My truck was broken into last night by person or persons unknown.

Luckily, all that was taken was the removable front to my stereo, but they couldn't even do that right. Rather than simply unhooking it, they wound up breaking parts of my dash to force off a removable front. Then they leave the power drill and crowbar they used for the break-in. (They forced the sliding back window open and worked their way into the truck that way, breaking the latch. I'll have to take that in to the Toyota dealer to get repaired on Monday.)

Had to have been kids. Too incompetent for real thieves.

Already contacted the Sheriff's Department and my insurance company. I'll see about getting things fixed over the next week or so. Pheah.

More annoyance than anything else, but I have to admit a certain amount of anger.

Not exactly how I wanted to spend my Sunday Afternoon.

Had a very odd incident at work today. Still not quite certain how I'm going to deal with it.

On my current contract, I'm assisting with a help desk. Now, this isn't your typical IT help desk (thank goodness). My company is fielding a new system and my job is to monitor the system, ensure information is being fed into the system correctly, help users get accounts on the system when the self-registration doesn't work, reset passwords, produce a few reports and when something does go wrong (whether a user identifies the problem or we do), we contact other technicians who respond to the problem. I'm not a techie and never claimed to be.

Anyway, today, around 2pm, I noticed we weren't getting information from a specific feed and apparently hadn't been for quite a while. My supervisor and I went through all the steps to isolate the problem, inspected all the logs (no errors reported), checked a back-up system, etc. In other words, we did our job first to ensure the problem wasn't on our end. So, I had all the information ready to go and called the source's help desk. All I wanted to do was inform them about the problem so their techs could look into it when they had the time. It wasn't a showstopping fault, but it could become one or it might be a sign of a bigger problem (lord knows they've had a ton lately on their end).

The help desk person was (as usual) completely in the dark about what I was talking about, but she said she'd have a tech call me back so we could hash it out. OK. No big deal. I went back to my work and started wrapping up around 5pm when the tech called back. Before I could even begin to explain what was going on, the tech (some very young punk by the sound of his voice) informed me if the problem had started that early in the morning, why did we wait until 4pm to contact them, since most of their techs were gone for the day? Then he informed me they were up to their asses in alligators (my paraphrase) and if I wanted help desk support, I had to call before noon. And then he hung up.

So, the young snot has no clue what the problem is, never gave me a chance to explain all I wanted to do was put in a trouble ticket (you know, the kind of things a HELP DESK is supposed to handle) and was just rude in general. Well, either Bruce or I will be making a call over to the help desk in the morning and having a little heart to heart with a supervisor. I didn't want the kid to "fix" the problem right then, but I thought he ought to know he had a problem. Bastage.

And of course, the kid wouldn't give me his name. . .

Blargle.

Anyway, I had a pretty good evening with editing. Finished Chapter 12 tonight for Harbinger by excising 269 words from the chapter. It's now a svelte 2924 words and I introduce the last major character in the book on the last page of the chapter.

Time to listen to a little more music and then hit the sack.

Current Harbinger final draft status

42,143 / 100,000 (42.1%)