Long Vacation

I just returned from eight days of vacation. However, due to various circumstances (birthdays, other parties, etc) tonight if the first moment I've really had to catch my breath.

While I was on the beach at the Toronto Islands, I had a fabulous idea for a book. Or at least I thought I did. When I sat down to sketch it out, there really wasn't enough substance in there for a full length novel. It was, at best, a category romance in terms of length and story. Not that that's a bad thing, necessarily, but I've never even thought of writing a category romance before. Probably because I've always preferred a longer story, a big fat historical I could spend a few days drowning in, or an even longer epic fantasy that would take me a week to devour. (I am a voracious reader, and shorter books are over too soon!)

I may or may not write it. I don't think I'll make it a priority. I have too many other projects I should be working on. The characters voices are so clear in my head, however, that at this rate I may not have a choice!

Exciting news!

I was accepted to the MIT program at UGA for next fall. I haven't been a student in almost ten years, so it will be an interesting transition.

For me as a writer, this is delightful news. I have always built and maintained my own websites, but now I'll have the technical know-how to design them from the bottom up. (Well, I will in two years.) My office is happy about it as well, since having a properly trained web designer in addition to a technical writer will look good to clients.

Will this mean less time for writing? Yes and no. Other things are going to be cut first - I'll be scaling back my video game addiction, to start, and we'll be having quite fewer home cooked meals that I spend an hour crafting. I still want to dedicate as much time to writing as my writing needs.

My husband is in the process of submitting proposals for a nonfiction book, and for the first time he is beginning to understand the sort of effort that goes into just writing query letters and working up the courage to try.

This is why I write

I finished reading The Land of Painted Caves and I can't remember having such an emotional, visceral reaction to the events in a book in many years. These are characters whom I have been friends with since I was thirteen (I can't think of any better way to describe Ayla and Jondalar - they are old friends) and about two thirds of the way through this last book I felt as though I had been punched in the gut.

This is why I am a writer. I want to be the one to cause someone to gasp aloud when they reach a plot twist. I want someone to feel an emotional impact so deep and gut-wrenching it gives them a tummyache. (Okay, maybe not that, but I've certainly felt queasy all evening now.)

I will be sad to see Jondalar and Ayla go, but their adventure has concluded after thirty four years, and I'm glad they got the send-off they deserved.

Great idea taken

I had a brilliant idea a while ago. I could write a nonfiction book on MMO guild management. It's a hobby I'm quite familiar with, and I had never seen anything like it in bookstores. Turns out I was beaten to the punch by a self-pubbed author whose entire text is available for free on Scribd. Back to fiction for me! Instead of doing Script Frenzy, I'll be doing a mini-NaNoWriMo for myself to finish out the YA story I've been working on for a while now. I've been getting about 1500 words done a day at work (I love my job) so I should finish the approximately 40,000 words without much problem.

Good writing trumps all

Over the last few months, a surprising fandom has formed for the latest My Little Pony series. The TV show, which is headed by the venerable Lauren Faust, has gained a following among young men aged 15-30. They formed on the notorious website 4chan, which is most known for its spinoff group of hacktivists Anonymous, and were more or less wrestled off the website by angry moderators for flooding the site with captioned pony pictures.

They call themselves "bronies" and have fled to a new home, ponychan.net, where they are free to spread the pony love.

I admit, I was skeptical about the new MLP series. I have made the mistake of re-watching 80s cartoons and learning how horrible the animation and storytelling was. But I figured that hey, why not, it's a Lauren Faust series.

I was frankly surprised. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is a testament to the importance of solid characterization and good writing. Good writing trumps everything - genre, intended audience, animation, even generational and gender prejudices. The characters are unique, genuine, and believeable, and each offers a positive role model. A major overriding theme of the show is to embrace your own natural talents, rather than try too hard to be good at things you're not really suited for. To that end, there are tomboy ponies, fashionista ponies, bookworm ponies, at least two small businesswoman ponies, and a pony who loves to party whose sole job seems to be catering and coordinating parties for other ponies.

If you have a girl under the age of 12 you can get away with watching this show with her, and she will probably enjoy it and you will be shockingly delighted at how good it is. If you don't have a girl under the age of 12 handy, then watch the episodes on YouTube, alone, if you are afraid of anyone seeing it.

As a female anime fan I brazingly watched it in the living room on YouTube, much to the consternation of my husband. I also went and bought ponies for the first time in twenty years.

Thanks, Hasbro, for bringing on Lauren Faust. Good writing really does transcend all.

Busy bee

It's a good thing I snagged that new laptop when I did, because my faithful old desktop system is on the fritz. Poor thing. It's had a hard life.

My day job is in an IT support company, so when my computer at home breaks, I know how bad the issue is and usually I know what to do about it. Well, the issue on this desktop is severe IRQ interrupts, an issue I had with it on its original Vista install about three years ago. That was actually the major reason I downgraded it back to XP and only re-upgraded it back when Windows 7 beta and RC came out.

So there's a few things I'll be doing to it, but if they don't fix it, the only solution is a whole system rebuild. And at that point, I might as well just buy a new DIY kit and start from scratch. Reinstalling Windows is always the last resort, but for XP systems the best practice was to do a clean rebuild every six months, and for Vista it was once a year. It's been about a year and a half for the Windows 7 install on my desktop. Perhaps that'll be the benchmark for 7 installs.

DIY kits are the cheapest option for getting a brand new system, but they are not for the faint of heart. Even I've only applied thermal paste to a processor heat sink a few times in my life. On the other hand, it will be excellent practice - I've been putting off the A+ exam for a while now because I've been scared of the practical. The practical entails being handed a table of parts and being asked to build a computer. Well, if I can do it at home with a DIY kit, surely I can handle for a test. Right?

DIY kits also don't come with an OS. My copy of Windows 7 was purchased independent of the hardware, and my licensed copy of XP is sitting there collecting dust, so I can drop 7 on this theoretical new system and plop XP onto the old dying system and use it as a media center computer.

What does this have to do with writing? Not much, except that computers are a writer's primary tools these days. When they start messing up, I start counting myself lucky that everything is safely stored in Dropbox.

Official RWA Member

I paid my dues and I'm now an official member of RWA. I'm still debating whether to go to the GWA chaper or the online fantasy/sci-fi/paranormal chapter. Both provide benefits, and while I'd like to go to the in-person meetings, the GWA meetings are quite a bit of a drive for me. It might be doable once a month, however. I'll investigate a bit more.

So I finally ended up getting a laptop. It's not a latest and greatest by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a killer deal and Office Depot offered me a special 4 year warranty, including accidental damage and one free battery replacement, for the price of a three year warranty. Now, since I know most laptops last three years maximum, and the 4th year of coverage is usually the same price as the first three combined, this is a fantastic deal. Couldn't pass it up.

For those who aren't tech savvy, my advice is to always get the maximum warranty you can when purchasing laptops. For desktop systems, the repair process is usually much faster and less expensive. For example, replacing a fan in a desktop takes 5 minutes and costs $15 in parts and labor at most shops. Replacing a fan in a laptop costs closer to $150 - $75 for the part alone, and then an hour's worth of labor.

You can skimp out on warranties on desktops if you're not afraid to plunge into computer guts - PC repair isn't difficult. I haven't had a warranty on a desktop since 1999 (at which point I became an unfortunate victim of capacitor plague in 2003, but the system would have been out of warranty anyway.) But for laptops, those warranties are worth their weight in gold. Laptop repairs are time consuming and frustrating and beyond the scope of the average home user. I've done them before, and I'd rather avoid doing them ever again.

I once had a Compaq laptop that died 4 times in two and a half years due to a poorly designed power jack, prompting the "no lemon" warranty to kick in. I got a replacement with no questions asked. My husband had three laptops replaced under that policy - and he repurchased the warranty on the replacement laptop for another 3 years, giving him essentially a new laptop for $300 each round.

The new laptop is a low-end HP, with similar specs to my 3 year old desktop system. But it's all I really need to run yWriter and Dropbox. And that's all I need to write.