The first two days of 2008
Even a superficial stock taking showed me that last year was a year of mediocrity for me. I accomplished far less than I thought in terms of writing, mostly because it increasingly seems that every idea for a short story that comes to my mind can only work well as a novel. I spread myself thin over activities the only value of which was novelty; they distracted me from my goals. Every January 1st, I try to set the tone for the rest of the year by doing activities that I want to keep doing more of throughout the year. All I can say about this January 1st is that I didn't procrastinate. Since the moment I opened my eyes (a bit later than usual) I tried to stay on target with all of those important activities, but I barely managed not to fall behind. (Because toddlers don't make New Year resolutions such as "this year I will cooperate with mommy in potty-training me" :-))
I did one new thing as well. I went to a meeting of a certain science fiction writers' critique group, which I shall call ST, to keep this post from the prying eyes of search engines. :-) One of my SF writer friends had said that the critique delivered by this group is so mild as to be useless: they'll never tell you if your story sucks. But I wanted to see for myself. Well, they didn't trash anyone's story, but they pointed out a lot of things in it that I thought were very helpful to the author. I felt a bit useless without having to offer any helpful critique to the authors, as I'm really not that perceptive. I'm blind to literary style, and I'm not bothered by stuff like frequent shifts of POV, and such. The only critique I can offer is "can you make it a little bit more interesting?", which of course is not helpful. :-) (I didn't bring any of my stuff to be critiqued -- maybe I will someday, but this was my exploratory meeting.)
And I am totally not equipped to critique vampire erotica. I have no idea what distinguishes a good story in this genre from a bad one. :-)
Today was another first. I observed surgery performed on a laptop. On mine, that is. On my dearest old laptop (not the XO), the one that mistakenly swallowed a gulp of my coffee. :-) Fry's could not fix it. The liquid has leaked into the system board, they said. It's not possible to fix. But to work around the problem of a mouse that thinks its button is permanently pressed, they recommended that I get an external mouse. So I did. Plugging in an external mouse is supposed to disable the built-in one... only it doesn't. So I asked a local IT expert how to disable it. It was supposed to be a quick question, but we all know how quick those questions actually are. This one lead to an-hour-and-a-half long troubleshooting session (you can't disable the built-in mouse from the BIOS, and you can't uninstall its driver, because every time you reboot, Windows re-detects it and reinstalls the darn driver!) that culminated in opening up my laptop and exposing its guts. Oh, what a white-knuckled feeling it was to see my dear laptop laid open and helpless! And how weird it is that to get to the internal mouse (or "trackpad", I should say) you have to go in from the bottom, by opening the hard drive compartment! Well, the IT expert cleaned off the trackpad parts and put the laptop back together, but no cigar. The mouse still thinks its button is "on", and it overrides the signals from the external mouse. More surgery, then. The guy disconnected the trackpad cable, finally disabling the trackpad. So, thanks to this good person, I have a working system for now, but I'll start to look for a new laptop soon.
I did one new thing as well. I went to a meeting of a certain science fiction writers' critique group, which I shall call ST, to keep this post from the prying eyes of search engines. :-) One of my SF writer friends had said that the critique delivered by this group is so mild as to be useless: they'll never tell you if your story sucks. But I wanted to see for myself. Well, they didn't trash anyone's story, but they pointed out a lot of things in it that I thought were very helpful to the author. I felt a bit useless without having to offer any helpful critique to the authors, as I'm really not that perceptive. I'm blind to literary style, and I'm not bothered by stuff like frequent shifts of POV, and such. The only critique I can offer is "can you make it a little bit more interesting?", which of course is not helpful. :-) (I didn't bring any of my stuff to be critiqued -- maybe I will someday, but this was my exploratory meeting.)
And I am totally not equipped to critique vampire erotica. I have no idea what distinguishes a good story in this genre from a bad one. :-)
Today was another first. I observed surgery performed on a laptop. On mine, that is. On my dearest old laptop (not the XO), the one that mistakenly swallowed a gulp of my coffee. :-) Fry's could not fix it. The liquid has leaked into the system board, they said. It's not possible to fix. But to work around the problem of a mouse that thinks its button is permanently pressed, they recommended that I get an external mouse. So I did. Plugging in an external mouse is supposed to disable the built-in one... only it doesn't. So I asked a local IT expert how to disable it. It was supposed to be a quick question, but we all know how quick those questions actually are. This one lead to an-hour-and-a-half long troubleshooting session (you can't disable the built-in mouse from the BIOS, and you can't uninstall its driver, because every time you reboot, Windows re-detects it and reinstalls the darn driver!) that culminated in opening up my laptop and exposing its guts. Oh, what a white-knuckled feeling it was to see my dear laptop laid open and helpless! And how weird it is that to get to the internal mouse (or "trackpad", I should say) you have to go in from the bottom, by opening the hard drive compartment! Well, the IT expert cleaned off the trackpad parts and put the laptop back together, but no cigar. The mouse still thinks its button is "on", and it overrides the signals from the external mouse. More surgery, then. The guy disconnected the trackpad cable, finally disabling the trackpad. So, thanks to this good person, I have a working system for now, but I'll start to look for a new laptop soon.