Spring means the return of the fleas, and other things

Did some rewriting of DoCS this week, mostly adding/tweaking scenes I'd made notes about since last summer. Needed to really break in the netbook I bought a while back. About thirty percent of what was in the notebook (the pen and ink scribble scribble kind of notebook) was actually already in DoCS, which goes to show that I least remember some of the things I write*, and also that you do not actually need your notebook (the metal & plastic electrodigital kind) to revise a novel. Ha.


The reason I bought the netbook (ASUS eeepc) had more to do with the incompatibility of WinXP with Win7** networks*** than me needing a replacement. My trusted MSI Notebook might look like it's all duct tape and loose screws, but it still performs admirably for a well-traveled, all-banged-up "old" (about 6 years I think) notebook, but the batteries were simpering out again and those don't come cheap.
So: [ new batteries]+[win XP > 7 update]≈ [ASUS eeepc], et voilà.

So far it's turning out an okay thingie, though I still have some peeves I need to either overcome, kill, or learn to steer around.
It really freezes up Word a long time while saving, which isn't so bad when I decide when it saves. But 5 seconds is long when you're in the middle of an amazing sentence and the things starts autosaving. On the other hand, disabling the autosave is not an option for someone who writes.
I really miss the Numpad and dedicated keys like Home and End and Page Up. The limited space on the keyboard means they have been demoted to "function" keys (which makes me wonder whether it are only indjut writers like me who use them). Half the time I'm ending up at the start of the novel (ctrl+fn+home) when what I meant to do was select everything from cursor to beginning of the line (shift+fn+home), and I was drawing looks on the train yesterday while trying to select everything above the cursor right up to the start (a cat-spastic: shift+ctrl+fn+home) for deletion.
Something else I obviously did not give enough thought during the buying: arrows. On normal keyboards arrows reside in an upside-down T constellation (seriously, that was already the case in C64 days). On the eeepc they are reduced to the space of 3 keys in a row, with Up and Down being half-keys, conveniently placed underneath Shift. Imagine: you intend to go up a few lines, find yourself going down (not really a case of sausage fingers, but half of a tiny key is even tinier, okay?) and try to restore the error by tapping the correct key (obviously above the one you were), you end up tapping shift 3 times and wake up some annoying "helpful" key-shit proggie (Dorothy boobytraps I call those because they do sort of work like "click your heels three times" and before you know it you're standing in some field in Kansas and you did not want to go to Kansas at all, okay?). It means serious retraining of fingerspitzengefühl. Changing keys around like that, tch.

Nevertheless, today I did some more work on the second UTA novel, mostly plotting and choreographing, since it is going to be a complicated dance: I've got background stories about Conway's past, then 3 consecutive story arcs, and they all need to get mixed up and taken out of their chronological order and put into some phantaspasmodyllic roller coaster of a storyline. It's starting to look like doable, instead of "what the hell did you think when you thought up this mad scheme?"

Also bought some more books today, mostly because last week I was hit by a spell of friendly idiocy and allowing The Heroes to go with a friend since I was still finishing reading Loups-Garous which, of course, I finished within two days and since I'm not sure The Heroes will be back tomorrow... Mainly bought sequels: Jemisin's Broken Kingdoms (because I'm just so much in love with the woman's voice), Asher's Brass Man (because Line of Polity was not of the same level as Gridlinked, though the writing is good enough to give his agent Cormac another chance), Tchaikovsky's Dragonfly Falling (because even if Empire in Black and Gold didn't get me in an obsessive reading trance I could do with knowing how things evolve), and Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion, mainly because it got onto the to-buy list, and it still looked good, or even more so, in the flesh. Erm, paper. And in sticking links to titles I notice that I paid too much in Waterstones, and could  even have had them delivered to my door for even less. The things you do to support your local bookstore...


*seriously, sometimes when I'm reacquainting myself with one of the books I wonder who has added a scene here and there. The wonders of writing in bits and pieces and hopping between stories I guess. That and writing on the train after work like a zombified meatpuppet.

** I'm not a total dweeb with computers, yet it has cost me some study to figure out how to KILL homegroups, but even then no talk between the dysfunctional family members. Besides, with MS every step forward is two steps back. Our USB printserver is also not compatible with Win7, and I refuse working with wireless [don't ask me why, perhaps part of Laumer's Long Twilight (yes, the one that ultimately led to a movie called Highlander) planted a seed in my brain about stuff being beamed through the air, and Walter Jon Williams' Metropolitan probably didn't help either] so currently I email my hubby the shit that needs printing, but hubby don't print because he is a lousy secretary. Good thing I'm not his employer because he would be so fired.

*** the mobile writing desk gets to link and update often to the immobile one, as back up as well as making sure all versions are the same. NB: I bought a GoodSync licence for that and it's still one of my most beloved programs ever.°



° talking about helpful proggies: about two months ago I managed to get confused about whether I had updated the shit, and had 2 different versions of a document. Not something you want to happen when you're talking about 100K+ text, and not quite knowing *what* had been changed between the two. Snagged a program called Diff Doc from the web which was great help, though working through such a shitload of words was still painstaking and long.

Cucumbers

So while I play All's Quiet at the Waterfront, let's not drown this blog in silence. I know how much you missed my non-review, beloved digiblips, even if that was a secret promise to myself and not to you (like duh, if you hadn't figured that out yet). You certainly missed the weekly adventures of my alter ego, not to mention my witty insights into whatever is hot news in Belgium.

To cover your pain I'll just copy paste three little items from my "something to talk about when it's cucumber time"-file. Cucumber Time equals what you English folks call the Silly Season now, but apparently at some period of time your English tailors also used cucumber time to indicate slow season. Now wondering whether it has something to do with the fact that pickling cucumbers/gherkins is not like, preserving the most nutritious or tasty foodstuffs, so not really working on surviving winter (imagine having to live on pickled gherkins all winter!). It's really not a heroic work either, not like fitting a couple of pumpkins into a jar or making chutney or sumfin.
Anyways, for your pleasure I'll trot out some brainfarts, like news is wont to do in such times, with stories about a Taiwanese dog helping old people crossing the street, or quaint medieval left-over habits of some village you have never heard of even if it's somewhere in your own country...

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SF/F/H in my mind sounds as Sfaich.

Meatball: Oh you write then? And what sorts of stories you write?
Me: Sfaich

I know, correctly pronounced it should be Esefefaich. But that sounds as if you've got a mental disease. But then, what do you write again?

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On "blogging community": Half the time I don't even read the crap you spout into cyberspace, digiblips, I just mark that shit read and move on. I can only follow two or maybe three blogs in depth, because there's also real world and news and silly stuff like that out there. And let's be honest, 2 or 3 people does not a community make. The whole format is also wrong, since you can't give and take on the same level. You yell something at the world, and maybe some of the world yells back. Is that valuable communication? Is that relation building?

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What everybody seems to have forgotten about in light of e-readers:
Suddenly it's all-okay to be staring at a lightbox for hours on end? The bad for the eyes has evaporated (true enough, we've got LCD instead of CRT now, but how is LCD less demanding on the eyes, especially on handheld devices, out in the open, with reflections assaulting the screen?). They truly are miraculous machines, aren't they?
Makes me kinda grudgy against all those years people nagged to be careful with me eyes (by me mom, me teachers, Concerned Parents Inc, and the government) when I was watching television and playing computer games for hours on end.

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In less brainfarty news: Mega-Evil-Beta Reader, whom you know as "hubby", dearest digiblips, started reading Tiger of Opal. He's making agreeing noises. Asked me about some of the noir stuff I put in, so obviously that's working. So far, at least, but allow me to go Weeeeeeee, even as his angry red pen scratches away at my beautiful baby.

Done!

Especially the latest changes still need much polishing before I'm noting it down as [completed] in my WIP wordcount list, but I officially declare Tiger of Opal as a complete first draft. Saving it as v.1.0 and doing a quick victory lap in my study.

Excellent, I think this deserves some alone time in the tub with Paks.

Verbose Off!

I was going to blog about very interesting stuff, like my confrontation in the Waterstone's in Brussels with !even more categories! fragmenting the landscape, but I find myself losing time by being logorrhoeic in MCN's comments and I still need to finish that first draft of Tiger so I can finally move it up from v.0.x to v.1.0 and feel all good about myself and channel all my verbosity into the second UTA novel.

But in short: for SF+F+H (and SF/F spin-offs) Waterstone's had shelf-space of about 12m (I think, I'm very bad at judging distances. In my defence: I'm short and short legs ≠ 1 yard/meter, and half the time line of sight is hampered by taller things. Shelf-height is about 1,5m since I know I'm facing the top shelf directly). Now they've added about a meter for dark romance, but impacted the 12m for SF/F/H with a meter for *memory crapping out but insert a label for vampire à la Laurell K. Hamilton*. Does adding categories really help sales? Is it logical to keep Dark Romance in the Fantasy vicinity? I feel they're already acceding to the point that Dark Romance readers don't give a crap about SF/F by making a separate category. Wouldn't it be better to put Dark romance with Normal Romance? Do they have Normal Romance in Waterstone's? I honestly can't remember but if not, a Dark side version wouldn't make sense at all. Will check it out in a next visit and someday answer these questions.

For now it's Verbosity Off!

Drat

I've got one or two hours work left to finish the first complete English draft of Tiger. Too bad I now have an appointment in Brussels, a meeting tonight for the club, and a test on that social law course tomorrow.


Sometimes it would be so handy to be able to freeze time just for a bit, or jump back a while. Or clone yourself. Stupid life always interfering when I can miss the annoyance like a damned toothache *grumble*

Writing!

And then some; working on getting Tiger of Opal into an "official" first draft and I'm about 2/3 of the way. The translating is annoying because it fracks up any sense of actually getting work done I get out of a wordcount. Near the end there are still some pesky paragraphs to translate, but I need to straighten the plotting first.

What I realized while doing just that: I need a personal assistant to clobber me next time I have cutesy ideas about convoluting my plot. Seriously, I'm not organised enough in life to keep up with all the convoluting. I need to learn to write something that has a nice and simple plot and ignore the little voice in my head that goes "boring boring boooooring!"

I'm tracking the plot of Tiger to hunt down inconsistencies and it's giving me a damned headache. Which is probably why I've kept pushing this on the long haul. But clones and identity changes will do that to a person, and I need to be anal retentive about this so as not to confuse the reader, at least not without intent.