A shift to the left

This morning I've been distracted by computer troubles once again. Armed with a determination to get in here and write my 500 words before settling in to other tasks that need to be done, I was almost immediately derailed by my laptop misbehaving. I'll spare you the gory and geeky details, but I'm over here, two feet to the left, now typing on Cairns, the most recent acquisition from the local library, who donated a total of three used computers and a slew of mice and keyboards to me last year. Hopefully he'll play nice and let me get my work done.

Actually, I'm supposed to be writing my 500 words before writing in here. Distraction. Forgetfulness. Me. Anyhow, I nailed down my 500 words lickety-split yesterday, getting them done, as I had planned to do today, before I did nearly anything else (barring breakfast, of course).

Honestly, I didn't mean for the blog to turn into a constant run down of my progress with the challenge, but things got all backwards today and it's so odd to be working on a full keyboard and not my laptop and I'm just all discombobulated creativity-wise. Strange how one little change in the environment can completely throw me off my game. It's time to refocus! I do have some topics in mind for next week. Topics that aren't just about my manuscript. There are some burning questions that I intend to throw out here. There are some cool sites I've discovered recently. And other things, perhaps. So have a good weekend and I'll be back next week with ... stuff. Interesting stuff. Debatable stuff! See you then.

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February Challenge Day Three: 626

That Old Beast, Time Management

Lately my life's been getting a little hectic - I have a lot of projects and life keeps handing me new ones. Prioritising isn't a problem, but scheduling is. I have to find a way to squeeze all my tasks into the day and still have time to eat and sleep. And play. Maybe a bit too much emphasis on that sometimes, heh.

This morning I'd planned to set up the old laptop I'm refitting for a friend and get it started on repartitioning, then let that run and sit down to work on e-mail and writing for a bit. Unfortunately the laptop refuses to properly boot the CD with the partitioner on it, and several attempts to remedy this have left me frustrated, and the laptop still in need of partitioning. The important e-mail has been sent, and I'm here writing, so I'm doing a half-decent job of keeping myself on track despite the antics of the laptop and the CD. I have another plan to solve the computer problem. Fingers crossed.

My emotions tend to steer my actions a lot of the time, and that's not usually a good thing. This unexpected setback first thing in the morning, for example, could derail my whole morning if I let it. Today I have too much to do that's important to let that happen.

Ah, success! My solution worked, so now I can let the partitioner run merrily all day if it wants to. There's one checkmark I can put in the box. I like putting checkmarks in boxes. At the end of the day I take a mental tally of how many boxes got checked, and hope I can feel accomplished for what I've done.

Another of my self-appointed tasks is the writeup of my Dresden Files character's notes. I've created a Blogger blog for the full text to live on, but I'm hoping to toss excerpts up on here. I'm also contemplating working through them right here on the blog, to show the process. As I've mentioned before, I'm writing the Dresden stuff in first person, which is a form I don't usually use. It feels odd for the narrator to be describing the setting details, for example. So I invite you to offer critiques on the bits, and cruise on over to the full version when it becomes available, which will, I sincerely hope, be this week.

And now, off to other things. I have a heap of work to do for my business client and it's gotta be done by month's end. Oh, click on the image of the frazzled woman for a neat but unrelated article on Salon.com.

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Footnote: Eheh, I seem to have b0rked the primary partition on the laptop, prompting a reinstall of Windows. Well, now I'll find out if there's proprietary drivers that will go missing... *headdesk* I think I'll detail that particular ... event ... on my Linux blog.

In Which I Tangle With A Short Story

I decided to sit down and get to work on my short story, temporarily called 'Prediction'. I pulled up the file I'd been working on last week, only to discover it wasn't the story, but my notes on the story. I poked around in my storage locations, ran a search, and came up with about half the story. I found a file that ended in the middle of a word. Fortunately, I had printed out the page I'd completed last week, but I had printed it before I'd made the last change, so the entire second half of the page is outdated. And the new stuff is nowhere to be found. I remember the gist of it, of course. But having the file go missing is not something that fills me with confidence. Lesson here, kids: just as in computer games, the rule is: Save Early, Save Often. Le sigh.

This is the first short story I've attempted in some time. I'm going at it with the clear idea that it is a short story and therefore must be tight, specific, and precisely aimed. And I'm floundering. I'm also finding myself attempting to revise my story as I'm writing it. I'm trying not to, but my habit is to spread out, to go on about things and explore people and places at length. I could do so and then trim off the excess later, but I fear running into something I like too much to cut. For cutting is a painful and abhorrent process, as I'm discovering with my novel editing (which I've been conveniently avoiding recently).

I have the story all planned out, beginning to end. It's a solid story idea, I feel, but the devil's in the details. I'm finding myself wanting to really bring the setting to life, to make the reader feel like s/he's there. But this is a short story. I don't know how much room I have. There's a lot of debate about the length of a short story. A maximum length of anywhere from 7,500 to 20,000 words is Wikipedia's advice, though if I'm looking to publish I'd be far wiser to worry about what my market's definition is.

I'm not going to go into markets right now. There are far too many, and anyway, I've got to have a story, preferably a salable one, before I need worry about where to sell it.

The only answer I have right now is the obvious one: Write. Even if I end up tangling myself up, I'll have written something from which I can hope to carve a sleek story in the coming weeks.

A Morning for Meandering

I've spent half an hour playing around on Toasted Cheese's site instead of writing in here. I am a bad, bad, blog writer. I also have typoitis today, apparently. My rate of typos is up about seventy-five percent. Possibly more. I don't chart these things, but it's a lot worse than usual. I blame squirrels.

As usual, I'm working in Kubuntu in the not-quite-as-warm-as-usual study, with my classical music stream streaming along in VLC. I decided on a whim to reduce the opacity of my text editor window so I can see my desktop through it, so it looks like I'm typing over top of a beautiful Caribbean beach. "Look!" say the tourists behind the camera, "there are words floating in the air, being typed with a plethora of typos which are then being backspaced over and corrected, before my very eyes! Hey, mysterious typer in the sky, you got some typo issues, don't'cha?"

Yeah, we covered that already. But I suppose you were too busy ordering your girly drink to have noticed the beginning of this document, eh?

Clearly, I am in some kind of odd mood today. But this is my privilege, as I am a writer, and weird-ass moods are where we get some of our best stuff.

As I was perusing Toasted Cheese, I recalled Jasper Fforde's series of books about the Bookworld. I've touted the Bookworld in other journals I've kept online before, but let me do so here: go read these books. Begin with "An Eyre Affair" and move onward from there. Ever wonder what the characters in your favourite stories do when they're not being read? I didn't think so. Read. You'll find out. Fforde's stories are hilarious and brilliant. Anyone who loves to read should grab them up straight away. Go! Go to your local library and seize them!

Ahem. See aforementioned odd mood. Yeah. This is probably the least professional-looking blog I've done in here since deciding to dedicated myself to writing about writing (almost) every day.

I mentioned the Bookworld novels because Toasted Cheese had for sale a tote bag emblazoned with the words 'Boojum Hunter'. The word 'boojum', in Fforde's novels, refers to a jurisfiction agent (read the books) who gets lost in a previously unexplored novel. It's used as a verb in the Bookworld, but, having not read the books in a while, I had the thought that there was a something called a boojum which attacked bookpeople. I don't think this is true, and if you go read the books, you'll be able to tell me if I'm wrong!

Anyway, my apologies for taking time from your day to be random at you. But this, too, is an aspect of my writing life: the 'what the heck /is/ this, really?' bit where ideas float around in the air near my head like twisted, broken little dragonflies, each whispering fragments of coherent thoughts which are lost in the incessant twittering of the mass of them. May your dragonflies fly in formation today.