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All contents copyright 2004 by C.J. Cherryh
Last update: 01/10/2004

One of those questions a writer gets asked (a lot) besides the one we all dread, "where do you get your ideas?" is "how long does it take to write a novel?" Well, I thought it might amuse my readers to know. First, how long is a novel? 80,000 words up to infinity. A book 3/4 of an inch thick is about 80,000 words. A book an inch and a half thick is about 120,000 words. How many words on a page of manuscript? About 325, doublespaced.
So---say that your target length is about 100,000 words or more.
And how much does a writer write a day? Bear in mind that sometimes you go backwards, and rip out 10,000 words. Sometimes you go forward, and gain 3. Words, that is.
Sometimes it's fast, sometimes it's slow. Sometimes you don't get anything done. Bear in mind I write full time. But I have to do other things, too. So I thought I'd just let you see for a while how progress goes.
I'm working on an untitled Foreigner manuscript.
Date: 10/13/03.....................Word count: 80,000. (rounded off)
Date: 10/14/03.........................................83,901...a good writing day, never mind the doing the bills and an hour on the phone with a misapplied payment.
Date: 10/15/03.........................................84,738...an appointment, and a pleasant drive.
Date: 10/16/03.........................................86,019...a good day, if distracted by groceries and baseball playoffs. It also rained, thank goodness.
Date: 10/17/03.........................................86,658...slower, but it always is at a chapter start. Don't be surprised if I'm late posting the next two or three days.
Date: 10/18/03.........................................86,658....convention. Not a shred of work done.
Date: 10/19/03..........................................86,658...convention......and a late party.
Date: 10/20/03..........................................86,658...convention.......and shopping for and wiring a ceiling fan, to get some air circulation, a long-postponed job grown necessary, given the nasty weather lately. I tolerated summer. It's fall, there should be snow, and it's still too warm. My definition of 'too warm' is above 68 degrees.
Date: 10/21/03..........................................86,658...one of the bad things about conventions is that it takes a full day, or two, to remember the precise next phrase you were going to write. And if you had a lengthy trip, even more so. This was an in-town convention and I lost 4 days' work......sigh. They're fun, but no progress is no income. Back to work...there's a mini heatwave, to my disgust, but the new ceiling fan will improve my humor.
Date: 10/22/03.........................................86,701...the thought I had before the convention has still not reappeared. Rack up five days of no progress. I'm trying, but yesterday having to get the car in for an oil change was a two hour chunk of time right when I was most likely to have made a breakthrough. Frustrating.
Date: 10/23/03.........................................87,219....slow recovery. Very slow. I always try to leave things where the next sentence is self-evident, but in this case it wasn't as evident as I thought. Sigh.
Date:10/24/03.........................................88,097.....Jane's birthday. And what work got done?
Date:10/25/03.........................................88,097.....driving trip, Jane reading and taking notes, me driving and commenting.
Date:10/26/03.........................................88,097....visit with relatives.
Date:10/27/03.........................................88,097...driving home, reading and taking notes
Date:10/28/03..........................................88,097...driving trip, reading and taking notes....AND...the special surprise: the housenet computer goes into diskscan, informs us it has surface damage on the main disk, warns us of impending crash, and this, of course, right before the end-of-month tax reports. We're thrilled. Fortunately we have a second hard drive that can suck down the data, preparatory to fixing the situation...which wasn't what we'd planned for tomorrow.
Date: 10/29/03..........................................88,097...Jane resolutely labors over the computer. I try to remember where I was in my book, what was going to happen, what everyone's name is, and try not to think about bills and tax reports. It's amazing how inevitably when I have downtime from a convention the next week is pure chaos.
Date: 10/30/03..........................................89,330...launched again. We're invited to a Halloween party, but I just can't, and it's hard to explain, but if you look at everything since 10/18, you'll see the reason. A little mental disturbance is like an earthquake in a china shop---and it takes forever to get the delicate structures and apparently magical connections put back in place, because no outline withstands a party or a computer crisis. The little bit of reading on someone else's work, no problem; but relinquishing my storyline for a revel---big problem: all the threads drop, make a puddle of same-colored yarn, and there we are, no progress for days. So I can't make that party. But, oh, it feels good when the story moves again. Y'know, writers are strange people. We can't tell a non-writer why we're glum (story isn't happening) or in a wonderful mood (it's ripping along.) No wonder there are so many divorces when a person suddenly becomes a writer and launches into that lifestyle bigtime. No wonder writer-types don't correspond or return phone calls for months, and then suffer guilt and further procrastination. But right just above, you have the whole tale of the reasons why. We're not manic-depressive. But we sure look like it. And a person who isn't self-confident and self-entertaining with a lot of personal passions and distractions, particularly one who begins to feel neglected and resentful when a writer-spouse is locked in story, is in trouble. If you've ever wondered why writers and artists tend to domicile together, here you have it. One of us emerges from quarters in the morning, snaps: "Don't talk to me," walks to the kitchen, gets a drink, and dives back into own room: is that a fight? A snit? No, not at all. The other one thinks, Oh, how wonderful. Story's going. And says not a word and is only envious.
Date:10/31/03.............................................90,396....and on to Halloween.
Date:11/1/03...............................................90,717.....well, you know what I said above, about crises? We installed a simple program on one computer. It didn't work right. We installed it on one of our working computers that has more speed. It screwed both computers, on one of which it doesn't work right and the other of which it corrupted the Media Player. This morning, the faithful word processor created a folder it couldn't find, and the kicker? What it can't find is the working manuscript. Jane gets that back. This while trying to work on a really critical scene. Meanwhile I'm trying to find info on the software company, like a support number, and their website is impossible to get into---who knows? Maybe 17,000,000 other irate users are trying to find out what happened when they installed the new software release? One computer insists on running Scandisk on boot, and can't be dissuaded. Mine is thus far safe, but the frustration is immense...and we're networked. To add to the matter, Jane's new reading glasses, expensive titanium frames, cracked right over the nosepiece, just cracked, under a gentle push to slide them up her nose. The glass into which she poured remedial Scotch turned out to have plant fertilizer in it, and over all, there have been better days. I want a reboot of yesterday. You know, system reset, unplug and try it again? We're just so thrilled.
Date: 11/2/03................................................90,717....Sometimes you just have to sit down and laugh. The computer woes are still with us, but beginning to make sense. Jane got her scene done. I, meanwhile, got presents in the mail.......TWO, count them, two sets of galleys which need to be gone over meticulously, amounting to a stack of paper, oh, over half a foot high, beside my chair. And there's always the chance that the typesetters accidentally transposed a scene, which actually happened in one set of galleys, so you have to read them for sanity as well as the chance a copyeditor stuck in a comma that makes hash of the meaning of a particular sentence. It's enough to drive a body nuts. AND there's the sad fact that I'm, oh, at least a year past any consideration of those storylines, and I'll lose my carefully gathered story threads on the current novel if I'm not very careful. It's still almost impossible for it not to affect me.... The very worst was when 3 publishers rushed to get manuscripts into galleys before they left on holiday vacation, and my Christmas present was 3 sets of galleys, two of which were quite screwed up, and all of which needed to be done by the first week in January. In the present case, one of them is quite reasonable---I've got 30 days to get that set done. The other one, which is more likely to have problems, and on which I didn't have a chance to see copyedits, came with a 9 day deadline---and you can't fail these deadlines or stretch them: if the presses are ready to roll, they're ready, and you can't miss that date. So as the world goes, happy Halloween to me. Did I mention that just hours before this arrived in the mail I had one of those crystal clear moments which showed me the end of my current book and I was so looking forward to making a lot of progress?
Date: 11/3/03.................................................92,437....I haven't laid a finger on those galleys. I've decided the only thing I can do to keep my mind clear on my current work is to go back for a rolling re-write, ie, go back and polish from the beginning so I can do something relatively easy as I get the galleys done. I think this is going to work.
Date: 11/4/03.................................................93,296...and I got through 119 pages of the most urgent galley. I'm finding, thank goodness, that the text is clean. This is a reprint with some new material, and the text may be from the current imprint's files. This would eliminate typos, at least on the section I'm on, so this section is all right. The trick is to read without reading---to check grammar and punctuation and continuity literally in the hindbrain, avoiding the frontal brain, where current story remains in residence. The fact I used to grade student papers by the stack does help immensely in this process. It's a particular skill it's hard to describe, but it's more like typing while conversing---typing is hindbrain, lizard brain, and conversing is more frontbrain. Writing thoughts down means that hind and frontal brain are simultaneously active---which is, my theory, why when I'm writing, I can watch telly, totally lose track of time and place, and still type 100 wpm when the story is moving. During those intervals of rapid keystrokes and story flowing the house could catch fire and I wouldn't know it, nor would I be able to say what was on the telly: the telly is white noise. But rewriting is more like galley-checking, meaning more hindbrain involvement, looking for tags, names, places, linkages between scenes, straightening up connections....mostly hindbrain but still keeping the lamp lit in the frontal brain, awareness of story and memory happening up there, while low-level recognition happens in the hindbrain. Is that bizarre enough? I think it's one reason why listening while driving is so efficient---occuping some of those circuits  actually aids concentration in others. And it's why inspiration so frequently arrives in the shower, when lizard-brain is enjoying the warm water. So, well, there you have it: evidence that writers in general have really strange brains, and why reality goes away when we're 'in story.' It's the ability not only to daydream, but to daydream with close, automatic connnection to the fingers, sort of like playing the piano with both hands and making up the melody as you go along.
Date: 11/5/03....................................................94,031....and I got to page 415 in the galley in a late-night session that lasted until 2am, at which point I discovered the ending of a section is missing, flat missing. This is a major crisis. Once something is in galleys, adding a page is a truly major problem, involving folios, the way the paper is arranged for printing in massive sheets before collation. Not only that, this involves short stories, and I don't have a copy of the story in question accessible. At something around midnight I wrote a letter to my publisher and passed the alarm, hoping they have a copy of the story with the missing ending. Did I mention I have to do the end-of-month IRS report today? And have the galleys ready and all problems solved before the 9th? I may have to make a storeroom foray, and dig into boxes that are under an eight-foot stack of boxes, at the very back of a very cold, packed-to-the-ceiling 10x10 storeroom, where my archive copies are. Did I mention writing can sometimes involve more exercise than sitting in a chair? PS: I got hold of my editor, who says she can find the story. Whew! But...the main computer, with the accounting software on it, is entering hard drive failure, and poor Jane, who should be working on her book, is shunting operations to the second drive, and trying to reconcile the accounts, while I try to finish the galleys so those can get into the mail. Chaos spreads. And the kitchen lighting went out, and there are no windows in there. Fixable, but a cursed nuisance. And I'm clinging to contact with my current novel by my fingernails.
Date: 11/6/03......................................................95,039....and I finished the galley in time to get the pages into the mail, all 644 pages of it. I'm tired. The tax report didn't get done...will have to be done tomorrow. Jane has spent all day shunting critical data from our hub computer into the second drive and trying to figure out what's the matter with the main drive. I think the answer is, "It's dead, Jane." I'm going to try to nurse the tax reports out of it, and then we're going to replace the drive and migrate everything onto the new one. Such fun. We're both exhausted. Neither of us has gotten as much writing done as we hoped this week. I've got one more galley to go. The last one had about 25 bad pages and the missing ending. Most of it, fortunately, was in good shape. And to my extreme relief, the second galley looks clean, so that won't be such a headache. It's also a little shorter. After the taxes, we'll be ripping the guts out of the main communications computer, which reminds us just how connected we're used to being...the very notion I can't tap a key and immediately reach the internet or a printer is kind of like...well, like flipping the kitchen light switch and having it not work. Got to fix that light... When I get a spare breath. Ciao.
Date: 11/7/03.....................................................95,039....and the adventure continues. Jane's brother had to go from Seattle to Salem OR to get his plane, which was with a mechanic down there, and you can't take a car to get a plane home, in the nature of things, so, well, we took another reading trip on Jane's manuscript, which involved first driving to Seattle....and hoping to pick up the needed computer parts there. It's 300 odd miles, and we got a late start, leaving behind essential things like glasses, etc, in our haste to get to Seattle before rush hour.  Just as we were doing some cleanup on our computers prior to leaving, we found an intruder on the housenet, and had to scramble to clean up our security, complicated by the fact---get this---with one of our computers using XP Home edition, we found we were wide open to such intrusions, and no way to prevent it except to bar that computer from our network. It's our newest computer. We are furious......and outbound, with one computer turned off, and the other two in our possession. We drove to Seattle through a not too bad rush. We got Jane's brother's car to the airport to leave for his return, and had supper...
Date: 11/8/03.....................................................95,039, but I got about 75 pages on the second set of galleys done. And we drove down to Salem, actually to a small airport nearby, had lunch with the mechanic who'd done the service, saw Jane's brother into his plane and drove back....did I mention silly me drove into the small town on fumes? So off we went, back to Seattle. But when we were in the heart of Portland traffic, we got a phone call from Jane's brother. It seems the airport he was going to turned out to be closed, so he'd had to land in Auburn. It's about 4 hours from Salem to Seattle, so he was going to have to wait until we got to Auburn to get him. The street in our instructions turned out not to exist, the building where he was was not apparent from the road, and fortunately, in the dark, he saw us and phoned before we looped out again. We drove on home, with the plane still stuck in Auburn and his car still in the hangar at the closed airport.
Date: 11/9/03...................................................95,039, and now up to page 150 of the galleys. We had breakfast out, ascertained the local airport was now open, and drove back to Auburn to deliver pilot to plane for a short hop home, after which Jane and I went looking for computer parts and technical answers for our security problems. We found both. It seems that XP Home doesn't have the same level of security protection as Windows 98, Win ME, or anything else we've ever used. If you're using XP Home, anybody can get in on your network, if you can get out, and rummage your files. So we're going to have to take measures, for sure. We're beyond annoyed. But off we go, back home again, reading all the way....and with at least a fix in hand for our first computer problem and for the new security problem, which may be solved by installing XP Pro, which has old-fashioned password protection. Take heed, if you're using XP Home. And the kitchen light is still out.
Date: 11/10/03..................................................95,039, still at page 150 of the galleys. Home again, only to discover we might have left Jane's coat and her keys in Seattle and a credit card in Ellensburg. Fortunately we found the card, but the coat and keys are in Seattle. And a power blip took out our network and our power backup system. A whole day spent on computers.
Date: 11/11/03..................................................96,337, still 150 of the galleys.....lovely computer problems and routine doctor visits for everyone. The chiropractor gets the back straightened out after all the typing. The sound card is in, the network is mostly up, and the power backup is functioning. We're making progress.
Date: 11/12/03..................................................96,449....150 of the galleys. The mainboard is in question, the computer can't read its drives properly, and we've reinstalled and hunted and stood in phone queues until we're frazzled, from morning until way late at night...boot and reboot, wire and rewire, and we've had it. Our motherboard people don't answer emails and their line is always busy, and I'm about ready to go get a new board and new chip, from someone who at least answers questions. Did I mention my brandnew fancy Hamilton Beach coffeepot died? A month and a half old, and it's dead. I can make coffee by heating water and pouring it through the grounds, but it's foul, Jim, foul. And me without proper caffeination is a very dangerous person to let on the phone with the motherboard people, whose Muzak sounds like it's hiccups at the watery bottom of a well, and whose advice is, well, not productive of anything but the desire to be with another motherboard company. I want to write! I don't want to fix computers! The fact you're seeing this is thanks to Linksys. Our housenet has proven unshakeable through all shutdowns and unpluggings and it somehow retained its logons. I love Linksys. I'm going to try to write, now. To blazes with the kitchen light. I can cook by the range light.
Date: 11/13/03....................................................96,449...150 of the galleys. For those of you who've been following this epic, you'll note I missed this date as if it didn't exist, which is how time flies if you're having fun....or rather, when your communications and your central computer are both out, rendering you incommunicado and thoroughly preoccupied with the problem. We spent hours on the phone trying to get this mess fixed, and still no joy: the computer still doesn't run the way it ought, the bios that ought to exist turns out not to be available on the motherboard site---it's listed, but it doesn't download when you ask it to. Translation, for those who don't speak computerese: the instructions that make our main computer talk to its new software and drives properly isn't up to snuff, there ought to be an upgrade to make it all work smoothly, and that upgrade is advertised but absent from the possibilities on the manufacturer's site. We're so thrilled. We have, however, ascertained that we have as good a bios as we can get on this board, and the thing runs, but not so it will handle the software we want to run, or manage its multiple drives the way it ought.  Our personal computers still work, and the house net is unshaken---but we're so busy trying to fix the main computer we haven't had time to work. This, since the power flux that started this mess, involves one hard drive, one power-backup, a sound card, a bios flash and a complete reload of programs, and after all that, we don't quite have a doorstop, but we aren't happy with the result, either. So why don't we just buy an off-the-shelf computer? Because we insist on knowing how the machines work, and it's good for the brain, if not the blood pressure...major credit to Jane, who can talk alphabet soup (DMA, AGP, front load bus and ultra-this-and-that) with the best of them. I'm competent enough with software problems, and can meander my way slowly through the hardware issues, but she honestly knows what the alphabet soup refers to---which means she sits and mutters darkly at the machinery's insides, and pulls and pushes cables, while I just sit and record the process in the notebook, so we can remember what we did...hardware installation not being one of those things we do often enough to remember off the top of our heads. And of course the terms and parts have all mutated by the time we need to work it over one more time and nothing we installed last time will work on the new boards.  
Date: 11/14/03....................................................97,236....201 of the galleys, the halfway point on those. A reasonable tranquility on a peasoup foggy day, to which this region is prone in autumn, and we both got work done that didn't involve the misbehaving computer. I also finally got a decent pot of coffee: I had to get a new pot or go mad, and I intend to complain to the company that made a pot that died after a month and a half. But I'm not about to call the manufacturer today. I haven't talked to a tech support person for at least 24 hours, which is perfectly fine by me. We have ordered a new motherboard and CPU, plus memory necessary for the new motherboard, which of course won't take the memory we have, oh, no, no such thing. The new board will demand its own day of distraction when it comes in, but that won't be until next week.  In the meantime I made progress, and have remembered where I am in the novel, and actually wrote new words, which felt, oh, so good.
Date: 11/15/03.....................................................98,076......233 of the galleys. Peace and quiet. A cold, dank day with a lot of mist. And a good day writing.
Date: 11/16/03.....................................................101052.....296 of the galleys. Well, clearly this book is going to be longer than 100,000 words. It'll be as long as it needs to be, but there's a whole lot else that needs to happen, and I'm not there yet. A cold rainy day with a snow flurry, and a bitter cold evening. I had to duck out to the store, and frosted my fingers pumping gas. Love this weather.
Date: 11/17/03......................................................102182....and 400-something of the galleys, which are now finished. Cold, windy day, with the promise of rain, but no substance. My reward for finishing the galleys will be going to see Master and Commander sometime this week. I love the O'Brian books [see the Recommended list, elsewhere on this site] which are our favorite traveling reading, and I've been looking forward to this one for months. We love sailing ships in this household.. (Jane's birthday present was a wooden ship kit, and both of us are looking forward to actual time to get down to glue, rigging, and serious plank-bending. I saw one of these kits many years ago in a storefront in Cremona, Italy, and never, ever, ever forgot it, and it turns out they're available in the USA and are still being made. At the time, it was about 50.00 for the kit, and that would have meant I'd have no food for the rest of the week, so I didn't. I found where to get one, and here we are...once we, ahem! clear the decks somewhat and have time to get into it. These things are not tiny models---this one's a little under two feet long. It has cannon and everything. More of this later...Well! Work's done and galleys are ready to mail, and this set wasn't at all bad, only 20-30 pages with mistakes on them, very minor.
Date: 11/18/03......................................................103552. The wind got so bad it was whistling across the vents on the roof, and blowing a gale through all the seams in the sliding windows, a good 50 miles an hour, but that was measured at the airport. Where we are, perched on a cliff on an upper floor, I think the strongest gusts were worse than 50...and I have some experience of wind, coming from Oklahoma, where the record for ordinary wind tops 72mph. This one sufficed, let us say. It howled, it wailed, it went on for hours, and Jane, whose side of the apartment was getting the worst of the racket, suggested we quit work and go to the movies a day early. So off we went to see Master and Commander,  fingers crossed, since we'd both been waiting for this movie for half a year. And we weren't disappointed. It's one of the most faithful book-to-movie translations I've seen in a long while, a surprisingly quiet movie, well, give or take the cannon, very British in style, straightforward camera work, no slow-motions or other jarring tricks in a period piece. If you've never read the books, go see it; if you have read the books, you won't be disappointed. We were so up after the movie we violated the diet and went for Italian. Tomorrow we pay for that indiscretion.
Date: 11/19/03......................................................104558. Well, I was unhappily right about the wind speed---seems it reached 63 mph, and blew roofs completely off, locally, damaged others, not to mention the trees it blew down, taking out adjacent power lines---isolated evergreens are particularly vulnerable to wind after a rain. We're fine, but many people are without power tonight. Working so hard today I flat didn't surface to get to the post office, so I've no choice but to get to the post office (a fair trek tomorrow) and get those galleys mailed, no time to lose, and I'm embarrassed to have let it slip today. It's forecast to snow tonight. If we get any moisture it surely has to come down frozen. We've wrapped our potted patio rose (which moved from Oklahoma with us) in insulation round the base, and snugged it up against the windows, but it's been a sudden, violent drop from 50 degrees to way below that.
Date: 11/20/03.......................................................104850. Not so productive a day---sometimes one hits a stretch that's full of knots. Snarls. Uncooperative bits and bobs that refer to things before and after a certain scene have to be ferreted out and rethought for implications. I can usually remember every instance of a reference as within, oh, thus and such a scene where X happened....but finding exactly where that was and how it turns out to relate to yet another cross-referenced item..... Well, can you say, nest of snakes? Sometimes it's easier to wipe out a stretch of text and rewrite it cold. Which means I lose words. Progrediens regredior...I'm making progress in reverse. I did get the galleys sent off. And then the new computer parts came in, the new motherboard, memory, and CPU. We now realize our old power supply isn't enough, and so there's more delay. We've decided to use the old parts to make a new computer for one job, which may include being a firewall, and to get a new case to make a new main computer out of most of the other parts and the new board---and we've been lured by the colored lights cases. Pure vanity. We love things that glow. Especially when they change colors. But now, just when we were ready to go ahead and build that computer, we have to wait for a new power supply and case to come in. Meanwhile, at 3pm, and for no particular reason, my accounting software unaccountably believes it has acquired a  password and won't let me in until I figure out what combination of chance keystrokes made it think so. To add to my frustration, now I can't find the new upgrade for the program that would let me just reinstall the cursed thing and likely fix my problem. The box must to be here somewhere...but one thing our business necessarily supplies us is stacks of printout and drawers full of manuals. "Somewhere" can be fairly extensive, and I'm sure I put it away for safekeeping to be absolutely sure I didn't misplace it in the aforesaid drawers full of manuals. The software company wants to charge me 350.00 to tell me the fix. Of course I would get a year of questions answered along with it, but I haven't had an operational question on this program for ten years, and can probably tell them everything about it BUT how to pry that stupid password out of the gears. I'd think the rascals could give me a one-question discount. On the positive side, we're having a beautiful snowfall---everything just pristine and clean out there. We got shorted in snowfall last year. I'm very happy with this one.  PS: Jane found the missing software box...which was no longer a box, but a CD holder. A minor triumph for the evening.
Date: 11/21/03...........................105,883. Still a case of erase and write. But I'm gaining on it. I've nearly written up to the mental question I was working on in the story before the two galleys dropped at my doorstep...I've resolved and eliminated one possible branch, realized what I need to do, and straightened up the shaggy edges, the possible openings that now have to be eliminated because I don't intend to take the story in that direction. It's all been good---but you can see from the chronicle above just how much even routine distraction can do to throw you off in a book---and you can't just stop living life and coping with the emergencies, and you can't wait for perfect quiet and peace in order to make progress  on a book, because I don't live in a cabin in the woods and peace and tranquility aren't going to happen. I don't believe in writer's block---I do believe that you can be thrown so badly while you're writing that you can't find your place right off; but one of the many advantages of years of experience is knowing how to hang onto the book when the obstacles and emergencies start coming at you. Principally, you just develop a set of strategies designed to keep your focus intact and find ways you can cope with the schedule when the sky really starts falling---like not trying to work during a convention, but leaving things where there's an obvious next line when I get back. And when you're inevitably distracted longterm, there's the oldest trick,   the rolling rewrite of the front end to get you back to the right place even after a dead stop. You protect yourself from full stop as much as you can. And when you do recover your place, this close to the end of a book, you have to become very, very self-protective and try to avoid any second set of catastrophes intervening. I happen to know there are no more projects floating out there in New York that could land a galley on my desk in the next few weeks, the plane is back in its own hangar, the kitchen light doesn't work yet, and the computer parts are still waiting, but, hey, we're not going to let the computer repair get to us: we get the day's work done and then we go and attack the computer. So if the creek doesn't rise, I should be working back in the scene where I was working by next week, and maybe---maybe!---by the week after that, I may even draw a bead on the ending. And I haven't wasted my work---the necessary re-read and polish is what I'm doing on the front end, and it's getting done early. Meanwhile the weather is beautiful. We had a marvelous deep, soft snowfall last night and one of those magical deep blue skies with snow piled four inches high on mere twigs, and all the trees sifting snow. We went for a half-mile walk in snow over the boot-tops, which was a surprising lot of exertion for two people who've been sitting still for way too long. We've resolved to head back to the gym tomorrow---our pre-holidays resolve to remember the diet.
Date: 11/22/03........................108038. A cold, cold day, but productive, and a fun bit to write. Ilisidi at her best. The high for the day was about 20, reached about 5pm, and I forgot to get my space heater out of storage, so I sit here in a 58 degree room, a little cool, even for my taste. As for our resolve to get to the gym, we kitted up, we got out the door, facing a sheet of ice, we'd been cold all day, and both of us reached the same conclusion: "This is crazy." So we turned around and came back in to await a slightly less ice-coated day for our foray to the gym. Where it's located, we'd have to park on the street several blocks away and hike, and that, not the gym, is the daunting factor---that, and the practical consideration that a fall on the ice is not good for the exercise program or the upcoming holidays. Occasionally common sense prevails. Ysabel, the cat, is not in her usual spot next to me as I work---she's taken up station near the heater and refuses to budge. But it's still beautiful out, sparkling day, with snow still in the trees.
Date: 11/23/03.......................109,334. Making progress. Cleaning up a nest of snakes with a pretty clear sight of what's next. Weather says it's snow flurries all week, so if we want any Thanksgiving dinner we'd better lay it in the next couple of days. Of course since this region is rife with microclimates, anything is possible, but the forecast sounds like the next Ice Age. A major triumph today: I got the financial program reinstalled and got it to come up without the password problem, and it turned out we had a good backup from only a month back. So now all I have to do is enter a month's worth of data, which is not that much. You've sat through my laments about malfunctioning technology. But such amazing times we live in. The approach of the winter holidays reminds me that if we wanted pecan pie in this season in the long ago, we got a sack of pecans and the whole family sat around the radio for several evenings cracking pecans. You could eat a few, but if the parents caught you munching too many, you caught grief. You took particular pride at getting them out in one piece. And if you wanted a holiday turkey, you arranged for it at the store and picked it up right the day before you baked it, standing in a queue of other customers doing the same, because the ice compartment just barely held two trays of ice cubes and a small box of ice cream, and turkeys didn't come self-basting or frozen like bowling balls. And what will we do for these holidays? Likely microwave half the dinner. And I'll fire off tomorrow's stack of bills mostly by email and think I'm extremely put upon. We live in a world of wonders, and what I used to do with carbon paper and a ribbon typewriter now is all computer---I don't have to sit with a ream of paper searching back and forth for a scene I want to fix: I just hand it a keyword or two and zap! the program finds the spot...amazin', I say. I think we stress out in modern life only because we keep trying to run as fast as our machines, silly us, when we ought to take advantage of the leisure time we deserve and drop out of the info-flow long enough to smell the roses. It used to take me 3 months of hard work to do a retype when a publisher lost a manuscript. Now I could print another copy or email it and rush on to another job while it printed or sent itself. I used to use whiteout and correction tape, not to mention those carbon copies. Now I just highlight and delete without even thinking about it, let alone having to blow on the effort until it dries. My first wordprocessor was 9k of programming and I used to have to stay up all night and feed the drive its disks when it was printing an entire manuscript. Not to mention when the binful of ribbon got stuck and you didn't find it out until it had done twenty blank pages and fouled up the count. Now I don't want to know how much RAM this monster takes, but it could index my whole manuscript and simultaneously print out inside an hour.  If I want hard to find information, without even leaving my chair or closing my manuscript, I flick over to the internet and ask a search engine what's the name of the Venetian canal that intersects the Grand about halfway...instead of taking the bus downtown and spending half a day at the library looking for a street map of Venice. I push another key, my map prints out in the other room. Miracles! So....I'm resolving not to get so harried, and to take it easy. The galleys are done. It's snowing. Life is good. I'll get the data entry done tomorrow, enjoy the snow, get the bills off, and still make a thousand words by nightfall.
Date:  11/24/03.......................................111,591. Well, the bills aren't off, but I'm making progress on the data-entry. It was a clear day. Tomorrow, they say, is going to start with a snowfall. We've decided to hang tough with the diet and celebrate the holidays in good cheer and remembrance of the occasion, but not by wildly blowing two zealous months of  diet on an orgy of pumpkin pie and turkey gravy, which is a decision we both feel quite happy with. I'll miss the pie, but not that badly, we'll feel far better about the scales in the morning, and both of us will feel very much better about getting some  items accomplished that otherwise would only be postponed again, not to mention that the computer parts are due in. Work is going well: see comments under Halloween parties; and when that's happening with both of us at the same time, we just don't want to take a breather. If they're going really well---well, the computer parts can just sit.
Date: 11/25/03.......................................113,256. The data is in, but the bills wait for tomorrow. I'm moving toward the ending of the book, now, and I've got to get caught up with the accounting, but nothing gets between me and my book at this stage except when I feel I've written myself out of what I've got stored up for the day. It's curious: it's as if I get up in the morning with a certain amount of interconnections made in the brain, and when I've played those out, the batteries have to recharge, and I shouldn't go past that point in the story or I'll start making problems for myself. People ask me if I outline: yes. But an outline is only for general reference, the general train of logic that should lead the events from point A to point Z. What is more important, and what doesn't ordinarily have a part in the outline, is the minute detail of what leads the people to follow this path---people most of whom don't agree with each other---and it all has to be logical for them, given their perceptions, their mistakes, their personal intentions, and their general character. That's what has to be considered slowly, as you'd consider carefully exactly why a person you know very well did thus and so, or what they might do under certain circumstances. That's why two books with much the same plot, in grand details, can be so very different. The events are switchable---you can actually move things around in the outline with no great difficulty. Getting the characters to make changes in their intentions---that's hard: you can't arbitrarily change the order of things. Character decisions have to hit certain marks: plot events; and if that train of events, driven by their decisions, ever ceases to be logical, the whole story does. So I have to get Bren to 'talk' to me day by day and 'tell' me what he's doing, and I also have to 'talk' to the opposition and know how they're going to respond. That is, I have to assemble the attitudes, the philosophy, the abilities, the 'voice' and the abilities of a particular character in my head, and then 'think within' that assemblage. And in the situation where I left him yesterday, Bren was pretty upset, and remains upset. I'd better go see about him.
Date: 11/26/03..............................114,409. Well, it was one of those days...I got work done in the morning, and then...then we decided to make a pre-Thanksgiving mall run, just to beat the holiday crush. We got there, we did our essential errand, picking up an order, had modest ambitions to do an hour shopping...and then Jane found out she didn't have her personal credit card or her driver's license. So now we can't enjoy the shopping, and decide to head home to find out what happened---not that we'd even been out of the house for a week, except one day. Well, it wasn't at the grocery store we hit on the way home from the mall; and that had been a strong possibility. So home we go, and right off, yes, there's the card and the driver's license right where, of course, they'd been put. But then I realize I was so distracted over the general crisis I'd forgotten to get any actual food for dinner. So back I go through frozen streets, into a tight parking lot---up here, it gets dark at 4:30pm. And it's Thanksgiving eve, with all the shoppers getting in after work. I finally escaped with my purchases, and fell into a chair and didn't get much else done.
Date: 11/27/03..................................114,409. Thanksgiving. We both decided to take a rare day off from writing. We watched the parades, had a nice breakfast, and attacked the filing, the remaining data entry, and the bills, which were in a royal mess. We still haven't gotten the accounts reconciled, but we're up to date in entries, the dreaded bills-basket is empty, and we only have to do the mailing. A local medical billing department, I swear, has gone berserk---they have a new computer, which just pours out copies and mails them, and we've paid the bills, but here we are with more of them, which their live people have told us are just surplus, and not to worry about it---we checked in person weeks ago. I wonder what they're going to say about their fancy new system when they look at their paper and postage budget. At any rate, I have the monthly taxes done, the checks are all written, if not mailed, and here it is sunset. Spokane in the winter can set in for days of fog, and it has done just that---the fog developed in last night, persisted all day,, and now it looks like a pea-souper out there, in the twilight. You know the frequent notation on fantasy-world maps, The Misty Mountains? Well, that's us. By way of holiday celebration, we did the holiday calls to relatives and friends, relaxed, and we're settled in for a very lazy evening watching a video. Go out shopping to all the sales tomorrow? Not us! We had all our fun yesterday.
Date 11/28/03....................................114,409. The computer parts came. And if there was a thing in this whole build that could possibly go wrong---it did. Jane started putting things together, but the case had no instructions, the motherboard/cpu people neglected to say, "Oh, you absolutely must have the serial number of your chip for warranty purposes," until AFTER we'd assembled it to the board with heat sink. You'd think they'd have a sticker somewhere other than on the bottom of the chip. No. We had to take it all apart again.Other really necessary bits of information weren't in the package, either. The new decorative slot facings wouldn't accommodate the cd units. The new motherboard won't recognize the old drive...the old number one drive that we've suspected from the beginning is going funky, anyway. And from nine to nine, twelve solid hours, principally Jane has labored over this thing, while I looked up internet info on our chip type, the cd manual, and how to tell whether the confounded white wire is positive or negative. Try it, sometime: you can find a map of fifteenth century Venice in no time---but try to find some site to commit to the color coding scheme of wiring. With good guesswork, Jane got the computer to come up, oh, yes, and we haven't fried anything, but we're still having trouble locating the DVD drive, the Maxtor disk refused to format the hard drive---our fix for how to get the thing recognized by the new bios, which is refusing to deal with the old drive. In short, no joy. So we're going to write off that drive and get another one, and use this drive as the number 2, once we get the computer going. Both of us have a headache, we've yelled, we've expostulated, and we've cursed. But we finally packed it in and possess, by this evening, a viable computer that can't reach the files and can't find a critical drive. We didn't plan for this to be a two day operation. But by tomorrow, we're going to beat it. The case is beautiful, with lavalight color changes. We look really spiff. Tomorrow, function will match looks.
Date: 11/29/03..............................114,409. Got too smart for our own good. We don't like XP, because of the security issues, we only have a laptop version of ME, and we have our old faithful upgraded-since-95 version of 98 SE, which we prefer. So what do we do? We get attracted by the new-tech end of things and we buy a Serial ATA [SATA] 120 drive. Now we're having problems loading Windows. This SATA drive may have issues with Win 98...read: it's a very large drive, our new board should handle it, but the upgrade path dear Windows forces us to go through to install Windows 98 takes the machine on a time trip through the stone age: first you install Win 95, wherein it can't find its mouse, and I'm not sure it can realize its hard drive is that big, so it gets a little lost before we can tell it the good news of Win 98 SE...wherein its true nature would be realized. In other words, we're stymied again, thanks to our over-enthusiastic purchase of the latest hot stuff drive. We may just have to bite the bullet and go buy a complete, not-upgrade version of 98. Right now Windows is hanging in installation and we're just really annoyed. We know, however, that the hardware works. Having been at this for 12 hours, neither of us got anything else done, and we may pack it in for the day if this last trick doesn't work. The trick? Now we're going back to the paleozoic---using DOS and the floppy drive to get it to wake up and notice the ATA drive we just handed it. Who knows? It could work. Apologies to those of you who read this journal to learn the writing biz, but, alas, this is part of it---keeping the machines in good repair and our knowledge of them up to date....And, aha! I notice that Jane has the Windows installation going on the old drive: we hope to get that up, get the drivers in, and then migrate everything through that back door process over to the fancy SATA drive, after which the machine will forever after know what that drive is. Stay tuned, space rangers. We may have the problem cornered.
Date: 11/30/03.................................114,503. A day! The ultimate from-DOS fix last night worked. We got the old drive booted, the system runs---well, give or take a soundcard/mouse quarrel over resources, which we have to call the motherboard company about. All the programs we installed last week have to be reinstalled, because we had to format C: to get the old ATA drive to 'take' with the new motherboard, and we have yet to migrate things onto the SATA. First, all the data has to be reintered. Which meant, of course, we forgot a few things before reformatting, like backing up our antispam program, which now we can't prove we own, and may have to pay for again. But all that---we can live with. THEN...then, the real joy of the day, just to prove that you can get into real trouble without building your own computer. I just idly went out to the web to see about upgrading my laptop, which I didn't build, queried my dealer site whether I could run XP, just out of curiosity, and when I came down from that site, every attempt to boot my word processor ended with "Word Perfect has created a fault in wordperfect.exe. Reboot." Or words to that effect. Now, if you think about it, this is a very, very bad message. I tried backup files. Same  story. Tried to boot other files than the novel. Same story. Reinstalled. Took the processor off and reinstalled again. Removed, edited the registry as far as I dared, and reinstalled. Always with the same problem. Ms Word, thank goodness, could read the file---MS Word can read almost anything, one of its primary virtues, but never enough to get me to use it. I could also send the novel file to other computers on our network that have the WP program, and they could open it. But nothing I did would fix WP on my own computer. Finally I installed a copy of version 10 of my program (I'd been running 8, which I ever so much prefer) and it booted correctly. Version 10 is slow loading, and I don't like the look or the feel of it, but I'm sure I can tinker with it until it at least looks the same, even if it loads slowly. This took me 2 hours of the day and a whole lot of my sense of humor. I was backed up, yes, but even the backup from the cd wouldn't load, and the option to run the program from its own cd produced the same error message. Go figure. If I have time tomorrow I may call Dell and rain all over their tech support, who will undoubtedly assure me that no such interconnection of events is anything but chance. I'm suspicious. Pixie dust may have fallen upon my computer to spontaneously corrupt a file as I visited their site, but I'm still dubious it's pixies at fault. At any rate, all's well that sort of ends well---I'm stuck with the confounded version 10 on something I spend my days doing, which is annoying, to put it mildly; and we still have to call the motherboard company on the other computer and ask why their own sound card can't play nicely with our previously happy ps/2 mouse, and what can be done about it. It will probably be advice like: "Get a USB mouse"---which is nice, except we use a trackball mouse, and I'm not sure we can find one that's USB that also feels right, nor do we want the extra expense. Did I think I was going to get some writing done today? I tried. I got something like fifty words...but I don't think further progress is likely. Did I mention the kitchen light never has gotten fixed? And now we have computers spread out everywhere, with bits and pieces and manuals all over.
Date: 12/1/03.......................................115,059. Not much done. A real nuisance trying to adapt mentally to this new version of my word processor, which loads slow as molasses---and since I'm forever diving into and out of the wp, while I think things over. that is a pain. Also, Internet Explorer began to hang. This is not encouraging. I think I got that fixed. And I discovered a really nice site that enables you to find out what all those programs that run in the background do on your computer. It's answersthatwork.com, and it has some really nice features. But I have spent this entire day trying to clean junk out of my computer, trying to figure out what it's swallowed that it doesn't like. I'm also running into some disk limitations---I'd thought I had a bit more space than I have. And of course, since I work on a laptop, this is not easily changed. I'm used to this machine being able to do just about anything, and to discover I have half the space I thought I had left, well, that forces some rethinking---and bumping some things off the hard disk. And defragging. Oh, joy! But I at least recovered my mental place in the book---I just get caught by small procedural things like...for some reason the pagination thinks the last page of chapter 11 is in chapter 12, and I can't locate the code that makes it think so. It claimed it had a superior version of Reveal Codes. Ha! Not true. It won't confess. The weather outside is freezing rain, I don't want to go to the store to shop for supper, and over all, kind of a funky day. I did tell Dell off, in writing. We still haven't gotten the motherboard people on the phone...that's for tomorrow.  But nothing worse has happened! That's encouraging.
Date: 12/2/03......................................115,059. Even less done. But the defrag of the drive much improved the performance and stablized the system...one can't install and uninstall a large program three and four times without creating a horrendous lot of misplaced bits. So that was one fix for the instability. I've been so tired over this mess that sitting and watching a drive defrag is downright restful. A foggy, but warmer day, and we had both a chiropractic appointment in a neighboring town---one of the downsides of sitting and typing for hours is aches, pains, and strains. Getting straightened out means I'm not making a pretzel of my posture trying to ease the ache in a shoulder that's sat at the wrong angle much too long----pain is not a writing aid, and does nothing for deep concentration.. It was beautiful on the drive---mist drifting through the pines, a bit of snow on the roadside, Mt. Steptoe, which looks very much as if Tolkein had drawn it as part of the Shire, flying a banner of mist above the fields. Delighted to see a new couple of the Hornblower epics on the telly, which means I'm in front of the telly and not much else is happening. But we were due a breather from the computer. Tomorrow it will be up early and getting some work done before we even say the word 'computer.'
Date: 12/03/03......................................115,752. Well, that resolution didn't work. Neither did anything else. Worked all day on computer tuning, and can't say we've made much progress, either one of us, except Jane got the sound card to behave on the new machine, and the computer, loaded with ocean sounds, sounded quite convincingly as if it was drowning or flushing pipes. Meanwhile I've learned I really, really detest the new WP edition, which gives me minuscule letters or huge letters, the one of which I have trouble seeing and the other of which fills too much of the screen for comfortable working. I can get it to look like before, but I'm having trouble getting the computer to hold the settings---everytime I shut the lid, it loses its settings. I'm trying to figure out how to make them stick. It's got to be there somewhere. And I'm at a stage when I need very much not to be concentrating on the program, but on what I'm writing. I refuse to make much forward progress until this program behaves transparently...otherwise it'll mess with my concentration....PS: Got the font size to 'take' by doing what I've done half a dozen times, and this time was a charm. BUT, prior to doing that, I went into Dell's Troubleshooting utility to find out why my system is suddenly unstable, starting with that popular complaint---"Windows hangs on shutdown." If you haven't had this one, you have the luck of the Irish. Well, after running the step-by-step system boot procedure, I determined the problem didn't lie in the Start Menu---and the very next suggestion was to see if the System Close Wave File was corrupt. Now, I had heard that if there is no wave file at the end, it is a problem...and sure enough, I hadn't been hearing a closeout sound. Not unusual, since quiet is the rule around here. I work with the sound all but shut down, and normally wouldn't notice. Well, my Exit Windows Wave File was definitively missing. I chose another wave file from the list, installed it, and now not only is the computer opening and shutting correctly, the font change 'took' this time. I don't think it's magic: my theory is that the screwed-up system shutdown was not letting Windows finalize those little notes it takes as it shuts down normally. That's why the computer wasn't 'remembering' the font change when it woke up again on Resume. Now and again, fingers crossed, I win one.
Date: 12/04/03................................117,503. Can I have this day back? After everything else that's gone on, our computer has fissioned into two, one with the old motherboard, one with the new, and the attempt to install a particular freeware dvd management software on the old hardware completely screwed the number two 'old' drive, while the other computer's brand new, bleeding edge (SATA) drive flat just isn't working, though its ordinary ATA drive, the one that was supposed to have died deader than the #2 drive in the 'old' computer, has resurrected itself in a reformat and is now functioning as heart and brain of the new machine. We are, not being utter fools, backed up. We have spent the whole day running Scandisk and getting functionality back on the crippled drive. Plus we heard from the motherboard people, and they kind of think we could have a motherboard function problem, but, er, um, they aren't sure. I love it when the expert says, "Well, that's unusual," and "We'll get back to you." We've decided that maybe one of the underlying drive problems is a) a SATA and an ATA drive, b) a lot of drives in one machine, and c) a very lengthy upgrade chain on the OS, because Win98 doesn't know what SATA is, and we have to put IT in on our way to Win98SE, which does know...is that complicated enough? So to simplify the upgrade chain we're about to bite the bullet and install XP to see if it handles multiple drives any better and whether if can wake up the SATA drive, which we'd like to be our #1. And we discovered that the new board wants to link the two drives in a RAID configuration, so we've been reading articles to see if we can split this mess, not tell it that it's RAID, and get it to manage two of our four drives. Greed for more drives may be one of our problems, that and being too cheap to buy a separate controller card, but it's gotten down to principle here---or what our dear friend Abbey calls the "stupid-stubborn streak." We're both interested now simply in solving the problem and understanding what hardware/software glitch causes our trouble. In the meanwhile, however, I can say I got some meaningful progress on the book and managed to forget that it was the detested new version of WP I'm using. I got my font adjusted back the way I like it, and if I could just get the function-bar to retain its setting, life would be much better. I did get the printer back onto the network, and that's a relief---I'm used to being able to jot down a note and have it print out. We're preparing to format and do a clean install on Windows XP on the SATA drive to see if that will wake it up. It's my own suspicion that old Win98SE just isn't up on the newest peripherals, and that if we want the SATA drive and the dvd burner to work, XP may be the way. Tonight should tell the tale.
Date: 12/05/03...........................118,222. Well, it's turning out to be expensive---if we want to do XP. They want us to pay 300.00 for each machine. Highway robbery. I certainly don't object if Mr. Gates wants to lend his wife one of my books to read. I don't object that I could make a dollar more if they each bought a hardbound copy. If you build your own machines and don't get an OEM copy from some factory, this adds up to a lot of money in a hurry. So we may end up staying with Win98SE, which is more friendly anyway. And it turns out we can't split the RAID on this particular board. We are waiting to hear whether the troubleshooting person can duplicate our problem with disappearing mice and keyboards or whether it's just a bad board. Jane wants to persist with it. I'd like to see if it will float. We have a convenient creek below us. Sometimes that is the answer. We have gotten the 'old' computer resurrected, and it's working. The 'new' computer with the problem board is still not seeing its drives, or its mouse (sometimes) or its keyboard (now and again). But Bren and company are working their problems out in reasonable style, and this is that nice stage of a book where I can just sit back and record what happens. I'm very close to the ending. The book isn't going to be quite as long as it looks because I have outline material for books 2 and 3 of this arc still sitting in that file, and they will be peeled off when I finish, but it won't be very much of the file, a few thousand words. Outlines are sparse. Or at least mine are. And, stupid-stubborn streak be hanged, we think we have now learned all we can profit by in this cycle of computer renovation. We know more than we want to about the faults of XP, dvds in general, various softwares, wave files, and modern motherboards. Tomorrow, we have resolved we're going to take a few high and wide actions on the computer front, find out what we can do for what we are increasingly sure is a problematic motherboard, maybe go back to Tyan, which is a very fine motherboard company, and then get ourselves back to what we want to do, which is write, and, who knows? maybe get a few holiday decorations up. I think at least the Halloween wreath can come off the front door.
Date: 12/06/03...............................119,228. The Halloween wreath is still on the door. But it's still been a pretty good day, compared to last night. We've been having intermittent intruder problems on our housenet---and last night a novel folder disappeared off the desktop. Shall we say---we were beyond disturbed. We'd previously come to the conclusion that our intruders were benign, a case of other XP users who haven't attended to their own security, and though we doubted that conclusion for a few anguished moments last night, we found out that our missing file was due to an undocumented feature of a touchpad on XP, which mistakenly landed the folder in, but not visibly on, the XP desktop. It was not enemy action.... The scare did, however, serve as a serious wakeup call to do something about our XP security problem. As aforementioned, XP Home has very limited security options. Our one computer that has it represented a serious compromise of our house security, and we don't yet have XP Pro. So we decided to do something about security via our router...which took some futzing today, but we now have cleaned up our network and made sure we don't have ingress problems. About time, and very careless of us. We had gotten complacent, being safe on password protection, until XP Home came into the picture. Take our advice and if you have a housenet and any single computer on XP Home, take measures sooner than we did. .....Meanwhile our other computer problems are on their way to resolution: in every likelihood, lucky us, we got not one, but two bad boards, the new motherboard and the new sound card. The supplier is taking responsibility nobly and properly, no fuss, and that will get fixed. In the interim, we are likely going to put our 'old' board into the pretty 'new' machine case, and then wait for the motherboard replacement. When it arrives, we probably will put XP Pro on the 'new' machine in the theory that it may be much better at handling the numerous dvd devices we have, and in hope that it may manage to let the SATA drive boot as we had hoped. I'll tell you, at a certain point today, I was moved to investigate the new I-Mac machines, just out of raw curiosity and frustration with XP after last night...and discovered that you can indeed integrate them in a net with PC machines..... But that was early today. After the network security fix and the positive movement on the motherboard situation, we're feeling ever so much better. We may even get the computer junk cleaned up enough to set up the holiday decorations.....My shopping is mostly done. I can be pleased with that. I'm the quintessential internet shopper---most of my gift-giving has to go by mail anyway, and I like sitting in a chair and picking things out, having had my fill of lugging a stack of packages through a crowded mall. I'm almost impossible to dynamite into going shopping, and always have had that attitude. If I do go to the mall for something, most often I blaze into the mall dodging around people and blaze out again with my single deliberate purchase. Curiously enough I do enjoy holiday mall-walking after I've done all my shopping. I stroll along looking at the decorations and feeling smug, knowing the internet folk are busy wrapping and mailing all my gifts, so I can look at the pretty decorations at my leisure, and not worry about a thing....And here it is the end of November---hush! I know it's really December; but the November bills have to be done and the taxes have to be done and it's time to do the accounts again...not to mention the end-of-calendar-year accounts. Sigh. That's one thing I'd rather-go-shopping-than-do.
 Date: 12/07/03...................................119,234. This turned out to be a cleanup day. All the deceased plants from the summer are tossed, the pots are stacked on the deck. The computer is consolidated into its pretty modded case, with the lavalight front and the four-color light side...which looks great. Only we know the motherboard is still an issue. The number two, 'old' computer is herded over to a side table where the plants were---the number of deceased to living plants was really not that bad. The living ones are just differently distributed, some into my space, some into the front window.   Oh, my, oh, my!.......Jane just came in to my room to report that the 'dead' sound card has suddenly and for its own reason started to work. We have our own explanation for this phenomenon: one of her principle characters is a computer designer with a wicked sense of humor, and just now and again, things happen that we have to blame on Wesley getting into the wiring. I can hear it from here. Half of this mess began because we wanted to convert our aging record collection to CD's, and the miracle soundcard from Hoontech was supposed to make that much easier.....Well, well, well. Who knows? It sounds pretty good from in here....And, let's see: we cleared enough space for a Christmas tree, when we get it out of storage. We took the doors off the huge computer armoire so that it looks neater. I just ordered a five-drawer wicker unit to go beside it to take up the junque that used to be on the inside of those doors....We got the aloe plants repotted, one to go to a neighbor, and the rest of the annual crop taken down to the general clubhouse, where people can pick them up and have free aloe plants. The things multiply like rabbits....and we've gotten the stack of boxes of manuals and holiday items out of the front hall, which is a moral victory. The manuals are destined for shelves. The clothesdryer ate, not the usual sock, but a whole pillowcase---mine---but I managed to locate it this morning, which is a relief. If the thing has gotten an appetite for pillowcases, no telling what's next......The floor is swept, things are on shelves, well, at least in the living room. It's looking positively civilized. The Halloween cat and the spider are off the front door, and the ceramic pumpkins have gone into their box for the year. Certain bric-a-brac will disappear for a season or two, and other bric-a-brac will emerge from storage---cycling it keeps the space neater and keeps it always new: less temptation to go and buy more bric-a-brac. No matter how we admire something nowadays, we have two questions: a) will it just be as nice if we take a picture of it and put it into the screensaver? and b) where are we going to set it if we buy it? There has to be an answer for that, or it's no-buy. Add to that the 24-hour rule, which is: if you're still thinking about it after 24 hours you get to ask the above two questions, and only if it gets past that filter do we buy whatever-it-is. So, well, the sound of music cometh from the front room, Jane has had one of her computer modifications work as advertised, and the floor is no longer a repository for computer manuals.
Date: 12/08/03...........................119,234. Had a rotten night...quasi-nightmares, aches and pains which probably are due to the diet---Atkins can be cranky if you don't keep up the minerals, and I'd been careless. Greatly enjoying The Egyptians documentary on telly. Don't know why they can't do as well with the Romans, but, hey, I'm not as expert in their culture, and I may miss things...As was, I got very little sleep, wasn't feeling too swift this morning, and decided it was better to do accounting than try to write; so I hauled out the accounts and taxes, and Jane, who stepped in first to do the reconciliation, discovered duplicate check entries from the great Reinstall. Oh, joy. I fixed that by the rash expedient of voiding the spares. I hope I'm right. But I think I am.... And then we needed to go to the storeroom to get the holiday decorations. Which turned out to be an expedition, because I wanted to go to the bank and the Post Office to get some things taken care of. Got to the store room, found what we wanted on the absolute bottom of  a stack that needed a ladder, rearranged half the storeroom, loaded the boxes, got that home and up three flights of stairs, and then I set out solo to do the banking---got there, couldn't find two thirds of the deposits. Frantic phone call home. Yep, I'd left them lying on the table. Then I lost my keys. Turned the bank upside down searching for them---did I say I wasn't too swift today? Found them, fallen over my canvas purse strap, just snagged there...On the positive side, I ducked way across town and got Jane's Christmas present---no, Jane, you don't get to know what it is, and I was so pleased when you wanted to go back home after the storeroom call; I'd been trying to think how to arrange that. Got the mail done, got the groceries, lugged them up three flights of stairs and the empty decoration boxes lugged back to the car---same three flights....We began to settle down to some tree-decorating and fix a nice home supper---when what to our wondering eyes should appear but the blue screen of death on the 'old' computer. Seems it had just lost a drive---or lost significant parts of its FAT32 table, and win.ini. This is the 'new' drive on the 'old' computer, that we only got a month ago. Jane, without a word, sat down, ran Norton, which repaired the FAT table, and began to try to find the missing parts of Windows, but I'm not sanguine. It's only the information on that disk we'd like to lay hands on, if we can. It's one of our backups. THEN, just to be perverse, the motherboard on the 'new' machine spontaneously began finding its mouse and keyboard on a regular basis. This is good news, if it weren't coupled with so much else odd. Makes you nervous to be 'netted' to these two machines. And, yes, we are defended against viruses. We've checked that. Unless there's something out there that nobody knows about, we're clean. So I plan to cook a couple of steaks, compensation for the day, settle down in front of the second half of The Egyptians, and maybe have a bottle of wine and give up on computers for the evening. After all that stair climbing and shopping, we've earned it.
Date: 12/09/03............................119,618. Well, no wine---we just didn't have the will to go after it, nor the interest in drinking it....Some progress today on the writing.... And after a while we decided to try to resolve the computer mess. Worse and worse. It looks like a cascading motherboard failure on the 'old' machine. I now question whether the early warnings that drove us to the initial hard drive replacement a month ago? How time flies when you're having fun! ...wasn't the motherboard blaming the drive for its own impending demise, a prophecy of doom which only came true last night.... But that's a theory. Another is that one of the cats walked up to it while standing on the carpet and touched noses with it. Proof waits on getting the motherboard to boot, to see if it has life in it, and right now it isn't responding to its drives. Off to the store for another keyboard---the one we were using is like typing in molasses and we were ready to pitch it off the balcony---and a 3.5 floppy drive: everybody should have one in house. The workhorse old Tyan board we thought we could use couldn't handle the larger drives, and it would cost 50.00 for a controller card that might let them run, so we nixed that and decided for the same 50.00 we can get a out-of-date Tyan board that can handle the (we're sure) viable P3 chip. We're going to be searching the internet warehouses for that antique. All this particular computer needs to do is drive a sound card and transfer our old wax disks to CD. It's not much of a job, but it has to be conscious to do it, and any old chip will do, at this point....Took more boxes back to the storeroom, got others to bring back. Decided to screw the diet and go out to eat this evening---Atkins folk can make do on Italian, if we're careful. I'll pay for it, but at this moment, a little relaxation in a moderately quiet sports bar and no cooking or cleanup sounds real attractive.
Date: 12/10/03..........................119,962. Got the dates off for a while, didn't I? But now they're fixed. This started as a beautiful snowy day, the nice sort of snow that you can walk on and not slip, and it sifted snow all day long. Got a bit of progress on the book---more than it seems, since I erased about as much as I wrote, but it was good progress. We didn't touch the dead motherboard today, except to discover that that controller card may be cheaper after all. By the way, I have to thank all of you who have written with computer advice: it has been helpful, and I am taking notes, believe me. Not entirely on my own, I got the Internet Explorer 6 patch bug tamed in my computer---it turns out IE has some self-healing capability if you click on its name in the Add/Remove Software section of the Control Panel. You at least get an option to let it try, and it finally admitted it was installed....and speaking of malfunctioning installations, I spent 2 1/2 hours in the hold queue trying to get our accounting program to admit I have a right to register it: I've used and upgraded that program yearly for five years, and it picked now, approaching the end of the year, to announce that I needed to register it, that it couldn't let me register it, and that ours isn't a valid zipcode, and that it was about to deny us access to our accounts. Go figure. I finally got a very apologetic young lady to fix the glitch and we are now registered, with an appropriate number to prove it...We got the holiday packages mailed, at least most of them. And we decided. since we could, and we were out mailing packages, that we would do Italian tonight too. Tomorrow we both have to be extremely good on the diet. Bread is one thing we can't have, and I fear we weren't good....We got a few decorations up, though the tree isn't, yet, and we got the huge mailing boxes out the door so we have room for it if nothing else explodes in the computer department. Oh, dear...I've still got to make those bank deposits I forgot day before yesterday. I wonder which stack of papers they're under now....
Date: 12/11/03..................120,333. Well, didn't get to the bank, but got some relatively peaceful writing done. One of the reasons the whole place is at sixes and sevens (besides the computer chaos) is that we have decided, in the midst of holiday ornaments and other disturbances, to have a Clean Sweep moment and get some of the office clutter under control---which means we need storage. One of the units arrived today, a nice little five-drawer wicker unit that didn't cost much at all, and that had very easy assembly. The armoire doors are off, changing the whole corner from massive black object to blond wood interior shelves, with now two seagrass wicker units that are much lighter, that fit the space. The bottom return of the massive armoire is going away, and in its place we're getting a light wood lateral file from Staples that can hold many times more than the old file unit within the armoire, plus give us counter space to compensate for losing the return. And it looks airy and open, which is a moral relief. All the clutter of envelopes and staplers and miscellaneous CDs and various sizes of paper and labels have shelves or drawers. The 'new' computer is assembled and looks gorgeous, lava-lamp lights and all---besides, it's settled down and become stable for all practical purposes, maybe even those purposes for which we designed it. The other, 'old' computer is still in disassembly, pending a  test or two, but at least it's quietly  nonfunctional. We got up some lights---one of the decorations just took a gravity-induced tumble off the shelf above the telly and sent both cats into orbit---Ysabel happened to be sitting on my lap, and she levitated across the adjacent table full of delicate objects, ricocheted behind Jane's chair, off the wall, past a favorite lamp without knocking it over and was gone in one direction. Efanor took out on an opposite course which I failed to mark. I have claw marks. We're still looking for the one stray piece of the ornament, which has been patched before....Aside from that, there's stuff in the front hall we can now clear, some stuff to go to Goodwill, and we're beginning to look downright neat. I don't know what things are coming to. Web page updates are happening. The end of year accounts aren't totally confused, just mildly so, and in short, we're in pretty good shape. The outside is covered with snow, the whole day was darkly overcast, and it feels like winter out there. The one thing hardest for me to get used to, living this far north, is how early it gets dark in the winter---full dark by 4:30 in the afternoon is just very strange. I keep having to remind myself that we could still go to the store for things---the stores are still open, despite the look of late night.  Very odd.
Date: 12/12/03.................121,114. (Got my word counts fixed, above. Thanks for pointing that out. Unlike Bren, I am not particularly swift with numbers.) Snow this morning, giving way to strong wind, a few moments of clear sky, then a sailing fluffy gray mass of cloud and a bitter chill. One of those days. I got the bank deposits made. We spent the day working, alternate with sorting a massive collection of electronic bits and bobs..."What's this to?" "Dunno." "Pitch it."...And Jane, looking at the demolished massive front parts of the computer armoire, has gotten some kind of notion about using them to build another cabinet. I can't figure out how this is going to work, but our promised file cabinet did not arrive today: frustrating Jane when she's in the mood to assemble furniture has this sort of result. Another cabinet it is. I had a productive day writing, still not speeding ahead, but doing some critical thinking as I go---in this job, time spent staring into space is actually working, another of those things that leads to a high divorce rate among writers...I managed to put a kink in my back that I absolutely cannot straighten out. Can't figure how I did it, but a ladder and the storeroom may have played a part in it....I still have this ambition that we are going to have these stacks of papers and computer fragments cleared away so we can put up a tree. We still haven't found the little ornament's right hand...I'm sure it flew somewhere unusual. We found her head in a bin of ornaments. She was just pretty much all over...but she's been patched before, and the missing part has got to turn up.
Date: 12/13/03.....................121,857. Sometimes very few words are a whole lot of work---oh, you can think up all sorts of reasonable words, but not the right words, and it just takes a little staring at the screen, dusting the snow off the satellite dish, pacing the floor, and doing other jobs, to get those right words cornered and to get Mr. Cameron to attend to business. I think I finally did that. I'm satisfied with the day's output. .Now I feel as tired as if I'd hauled boxes, even if I haven't typed any more than I'm likely to type on this little entry. But I erased a few big sections, too, so I suppose there were more words than seems. The rest---I can only hope for a tranquil day tomorrow when I have more energy....It's been another lazy, snowy day: it's misted snow, snowed flakes, snowed hard, and gone back to mist again, occasionally melting, and then half-freezing, and even Ysabel won't come out of her nook by the heater. All this alternate melting and freezing makes me just a little less enthusiastic than I might be about driving down to the store, though the faithful Subaru has all-wheel drive. I don't get stuck or slip much, but I'm less sure about the other guy...Among mysteries solved, Jane managed to locate our missing filing cabinet: it didn't get shipped when they said, they now inform us, so it will arrive Monday. And since there's all this clear space in front of the desk, I took advantage of the delay in delivery to sit down in the floor and sort and file a considerable stack of miscellaneous computer-related receipts, booklets, downloads, and papers, so we will be somewhat organized even before it arrives, and I can just pop the result into our splendid new completely-accessible file drawers....Meanwhile, and on the computer news front, Jane has gotten inspired to update her webpage (gasp!) twice in one week and she has just uploaded the result. She's still battling a few glitches---she's gotten interested in my software, which is Frontpage, for ease of use, if not elegance of code, but she's still running on the old software, which, by me, is more elegant, but a bear to use and worse to update---which means if you spot a wee, ignorable typo, it takes fortitude and resolve to go after it. She's trying to figure out what's not loading and fix a few links for starters. And, the bonus, she's gotten increasingly intrigued by this concept of an online journal, and, not to be outdone, is providing pictures and animations for a counter-journal of her own---with, you can guess, her side of the computer build story. You can reach her site via the link on my entry page. Oh, dear, the telly is chirping again---more snow on the dish. Got to get the duster after it.
Date: 12/14/03......................121,857.  My brother's birthday. Well, the burst of energy didn't happen, and this is no section to go into with less than full concentration. And friends from across the state dropped by, so we went out to lunch, and there went the day. I'm watching the Dinosaur Planet special. Really nice. It's a day of intermission in what will be a week of snow---semi-blue skies and slick, squishy slush in the shade. And outside of the mad scramble to clean the place to something respectable before company dropped by, we haven't done much of anything today that I can exactly identify. First we were waiting for company and then we were trying to find a restaurant with enough parking---it's Christmas rush out there, and parking is at a premium. I, she said smugly, am quite done with all my ordering and shipping, so we visited the local computer store to pick up some supplies and fled homeward, not to shop again until after Christmas, if we can manage it. Other than that I can't figure where the day has gone. Which is probably just as well. If I'm that dim, I shouldn't be writing a critical scene.
Date: 12/15/03......................121,857. Not a thing done. Sometimes when my subconscious thinks I'm getting close to an ending, I tend to stall out for a few days, thinking, in a hindbrain way, through all the things I had to do, and making sure I've done them....There's that---and the fact that I might actually have some sort of bug. Not the flu, I think, since we had the shots, but certainly I haven't felt well since I ate lunch yesterday.... And the file cabinet came, one of those Sauder assemble-it-yourself jobs, and Jane is not happy---the thing had evidently sat in the damp of snow and rain since last Friday when it should have been delivered, this being a Monday. It didn't arrive until afternoon, and the particle board had absorbed a lot of damp, wherever they had set it when they decided it was too late to deliver it. One part of the top shows signs of warp. And we're suspicious it could have been a return, since there are three different colors of finish in the thing---this is not like Sauder, which is generally a very good company. Jane is sitting over there putting things together and seeing if it will dry out straight. I'm hoping it will work without us sending for more parts. I'm ever so anxious to get our files in order---for the first time since we moved here. That will mean we have the whole working desk straightened away, with supplies and files within reach. The bonus is, it looks civilized, to boot...Clear weather today, which will probably give way to snow tonight, patchy ice, which I've gotten the knack of walking on without snow boots---one of these days I'm going to hit the patch I can't navigate---getting entirely too cocky, likely...If we can get the filing cabinet put together, the next step is to put up the tree, so it looks as if we may make it before the holidays. I'm very anxious to get the filing straightened away and, on the computer front, Jane is going to try to get that other computer to wake up. Meanwhile I'm reaching the conclusion I should back up my faithful Dell laptop and reinstall Windows, but I'm not anxious to do that until I get this novel done, and until it's the other side of the holidays. My laptop has a section at the back of the hard disk that is a real scattered nest of unmoveable files, that just isn't helping it run well. Right now it's reliable but not as stable as I'd like---a whole lot more stable than before I started working on it, but I've only pinpointed a set of problems best cured by a reinstall, as I read it. I bought a copy of System Mechanic, which is pretty good at sorting through the registry and finding duplicates---like any of those softwares, it really helps to have a good idea what you're tinkering with before you start pushing buttons: you can lock yourself out of your own files by a bad Security decision, or do bad things to your webfiles with too early a "yes" to "Eliminate Duplicate Files." I at least know when not to agree with it. The disappointing thing is its Optimizer, which hangs, but that may be that knotty problem on my hard disk, the same one that convinces me it would be a good idea to reinstall, so I can't blame it too much. We'll see. Meanwhile, I'm going to play my new computer game---Port Royale, involving trade and piracy, just my cup of tea---and take the evening off. Oh, dear: Jane is working the new file cabinet drawers and sounding distressed---they're not working smoothly. Ah, that sounded better...maybe...
Date: 12/16/03..........................121,857. No movement. But---something worked right, namely the file cabinet drawers, which proved to work just as they should: the cabinet doesn't let the bottom drawer out until the top drawer is firmly back in place, and vice versa---much nicer than landing the whole filing cabinet on its nose with all drawers simultaneously extended. So we are happy, and the various colors of wood proved to be interior, where they don't show...Today we went to the chiropractor, and high time---my back had reached the numb stage, and now, as frequently happens when everything pops back into place, I can't stay awake. I plan to get a good night's sleep and get to work tomorrow. I think I have had a bit of a bug. The burger at one the world's truly fine burger places, that I'd been looking forward to for two weeks---we only get these when we go to the chiropractor, since they're right adjacent---this perfectly wonderful and long-anticipated burger tasted bitter and nasty. Which argues for my having had some sort of bug the last several days...and today, while I attended to the filing, and got things marvelously organized---Jane attempted to revive the 'old' computer, which waked, gasped, protested it had a checksum error and couldn't find the FAT32 table, and couldn't find its CD drive. Not good. Not good at all. So we bought a new CD burner, and Jane is valiantly re-re-reinstalling Windows after checking all jumpers and such. The problem is that this was running with the ABIT motherboard, which Jane now theorizes could simply have lost its CMOS battery---but that's another story, and it warrants a later checkout. At any rate, in current operations, Jane is trying to bring up the Tyan board, which is an excellent, though older board; and the 'old' computer consequently has some adjustment to do---read: reformat C and reinstall everything. Personally, I think Maxtor with its formatting software is a wondrous thing, but we've have it Not Work, and that rather makes me long to go over there and perform the classic Jurassic reformat, just going into DOS, typing "format C", transferring System, and seeing if it wakes up capable of absorbing Windows in a polite and sensible fashion.... I know, I know, these huge hard disks aren't the species of dinosaur that I used to deal with, and doing a DOS format would probably Not Work, either. Sort of like wanting to bash the thing with a hammer and hoping for it to work...But Jane is having some success. There is at least an intelligible screen showing over there and the 'old' computer is swallowing software, so something must have worked.... One of these days I may decide to build my own computer, me, myself, from scratch, rather than letting Jane have all the fun. But for now I think I'll content myself with reformatting C on my laptop...an operation I used to perform as often as I wanted to make major changes, back in the Jurassic of DOS, but now---the number of programs that have to be reloaded, not to mention all the serial numbers that have to be located---easier with our new filing system---is daunting....You know what software someone ought to invent? A Serial Number Safe, one that you could just tuck into your hard drive to store all those nasty huge codes and spit them up at need. I know, I know, someone would hack and abuse it, but something like a blackboxed Secure Wallet for those cursed numbers would make reinstalls a much saner operation. Hear that, Norton?...At any rate, the game is mildly amusing, and not too hard. It really helps to know a bit of history, and a larger bit of Caribbean geography, but it's a fun diversion. Here's hoping for a quiet, productive morrow. 
Date: 12/17/03...........................121, 857. Opened the file, took a look at it, assessed whether I have a shred of creativity today. Negative. So I closed the file, went off to file physical papers, stacks thereof, which was about the mental acuity I had, roughly that of a potato, I think. Lazy. Tired. Feeling better, but not quite possessing the energy it takes to write that particular scene...On the computer front, there is life, and movement, and that may even get finished. Jane had the fortitude to take a brisk open-air walk down to the store. I sat and vegetated. And filed. Which at least cleared stacks of miscellaneous paper. Progress, of a sort.
Date: 12/18/03...........................122, 405. I have a brain again. Worked this morning, refound my scene, then decided, after I had written out that head of steam, that I had better do some disk cleanup, which meant transferring files to backup. And since, in mid-operation, the computer calculated it would take 9,456,000-odd minutes to finish transferring my photo files via the house net, I decided that maybe a) I had way too many bmp and tif files, b) the computer was royally confused, and c) I'd really better terminate that file transfer before I screwed the new hard disk and irritated Jane a very great deal... So instead of transferring everything over the house net, I spent a couple of hours transferring everything to CD and then deleting files (a couple of gig worth) and optimizing, at least as far as the notebook disk will admit is possible. I still haven't looked at whatever it thought it was doing to the new hard drive. I'm not sure I want to know, but I had better go over there, take a look and make sure it didn't copy crom-many versions of the Acropolis snapshot or the Badlands to that disk. If it did---then I have to ask myself whether I should tell Jane or not, or just quietly erase the evidence... And lest you ask why any sane person takes meg-sized pictures, or worse, stuffs their hard disk with them---I was trying to get some faded age-faded slides to scan in with enough info to let me reconstitute the proper color, etc. I'm not sure that was the way to go about that restoration, but it seemed at the time that more information rather than less might be helpful to the effort. At any rate, I got distracted from the project this summer and forgot they were on the disk, buried way down in subdirectories, which answers to a certain extent why my 20 gig drive seemed a little crowded. I never thought in all reason I'd want an 80 gig drive, but lately I do, silly me. I remember an old Greek proverb, to wit, "Mega biblion, mega kakon," which is, politely translated, "Big book, big trouble," ---relating to the days in which, if you wanted some particular paragraph in a major-sized scroll, you had an unwieldy lot to wade through, and Zeus forbid you dropped the thing and then had to reroll it. This proverb applies equally well to hard drives, which  now exceed the ability of older operating systems to control. One can get just too greedy for space. And if optimizing a 20 gig drive is a time-consumer, optimizing an 80 gig drive is a bit more so, I'm sure. I keep telling myself if I restrain my image collection and other such space-hogs, I could quite well do with 20, or at max, 40. So I say at this moment, until greed takes over...Meanwhile our snow fizzled, went north of us. More will arrive this weekend, they say...My favorite baseball team just signed Ichiro Suzuki to a four year contract, which is a relief---I've been following the trades, and was prepared to go into mourning if we lost him. So if you know baseball, you know what team I favor...We got the tree up. It has lights---but that's cheating: it uses fiber-optic lights, which come with it. But we do have other decorations up. We were going to hang ornaments today, but somehow we didn't get around to it...No computer blew up all day long, that's the good news---this is counting that I didn't just do something awful to the 'new' computer with my photo backup...And as I write, Jane is over there swearing at Namo Web Editor, which seems to have scattered fossil font-changes gratuitously throughout her hypertext. Is that sentence English? Companglish, at least. Translation: she's trying to root the chaff out...by hand. This afternoon, by the way, I put in a repair request for our kitchen lights---hurrah!---and hope to be able to see what I'm cooking as early as next week.
Date:12/19/03...........................123,195. A little good progress. Then the chap arrived to fix the kitchen lights---not that I can't change a lightbulb, mind, and would have, but the apartment complex maintains the lighted kitchen ceiling and the very long bulbs, which are a pain to transport. And in this case, yes, it was the ballast in the leadoff fixture. It's so nice to see what I'm doing in there again. I celebrated by sitting down and this time Jane is fixing supper, a very nice supper, by the aroma wafting from the kitchen. We decorated the tree today, the theme of which seems, this year, to be pirates and snow fairies and reindeer...and it looks festive around here. We're creating dvd's with no problem now, and, no, I didn't blow up Jane's laboriously installed hard disk. The files were just stalled out on the house net, she informs me, and that's ok, I now have backup, and I have a much cleaner notebook disk.... The weather is sunny above patchy ice, but more is coming, so I took the chance to dive down to the grocery store, which turned out to be a zoo. We live in an older neighborhood, Victorian in many points, and I think with some of the original residents, who don't move real fast in the aisles. Then there are the occasional Downtown Types, some of which are feckless and sweet, and some of which, well, the less said the better. I love living downtown, seriously, I do---I grew up in a small town in which children rode the bus solo, and in which I made speaking acquaintance with some of our town's more unusual souls. Plus my art teacher assigned her classes to sit on the bus---no matter which bus, but they all looped---and draw mouths, or eyes, or noses, or whatever, as an exercise in observation; and this provoked people to talk. So I developed a fine appreciation for the survivors of the world---many of whom live downtown. We had our signboard-sandwich prophet of doom, a guy who used to stray out into the middle of the fair-sized street to make his points, we had various soldiers to-ing and fro-ing on a 24 hour pass, we had the usual suspects, and over all, I'm very grateful I got to know the downtown. The present town is just about right to do this in, with much the same sort of feeling. And I can muster patience. Fretting at the slow person in front of me is pointless---and it's surely someone's grandfather, so what the heck? Am I perishing for a little delay? I don't think so. The two to three months I saved not having to hand type my manuscripts (see above) are more than sufficient to let me wait. The weather's good, the air is nippy, and I'm feeling a burst of holiday cheer. Tomorrow Jane is baking holiday cookies for a very few friends who really look forward to them, and we are going to be resolute and not eat a one of them. We'll see how long that holds up. We did say we're having waffles for Christmas morning---and I bought some huckleberry syrup, just for the occasion.
Date:12/20/03........................123,195. No progress whatsover, nor any great amount accomplished, except thinking, and thinking. Which is progress, just not measurable. Jane took advantage of the newly relighted kitchen to do the holiday baking, and my resolve mostly held up---there are only two cookies I find it really hard to resist, and one of them is Russian Teacakes. Ah, me. I had one, which was pretty bad, but it was good...We're running a memory checker---thank you, who recommended it---on the 'old' computer, which has continued to report problems on boot. Once we've eliminated memory as a problem, we'll turn our eye to the main drive, the 'new' drive we bought for the 'old' computer because the 'old' drive in the 'old' computer was reporting problems---are you following this? At any rate, it keeps insisting on running Scandisk, and we're getting way tired of that behavior. So if it's not the memory, we begin to turn a suspicious eye in that direction...Enough computers, anyway...It snowed last night, promises to do it again tonight, and that's fine with me. Fitting with the season...As for the writing, I now know what happens: I just have to make sure every angle is covered. So much enthusiasm goes into writing the ending that if I should have to redo it, it would be a real downer. So I have to be sure I know exactly where I'm going before I do it.
Date:12/21/03..........................123,195. No progress. A misty, lazy day, hovering just above freezing, and I'm still thinking. Jane is doing some house cleaning---looks likely we'll have guests at Christmas...and if I can shake this headache I should join in....A minor success on the computer front: the memory and related things are rock solid, which eliminated that possibility. Then the second try at computer diagnosis, with a well-concealed little utility we downloaded from Maxtor---their site is amazingly difficult to navigate---turned up not one, but now two problematic drives. [Powermax is the name of the download, for those of you who own Maxtor drives. Caution: one test will destroy data, so be sure there's nothing needful on the drive you test.] Nothing turned up on the first four tests, but the fifth test turned up a failure inside ten seconds. The second drive didn't even take that long to report problems. So the 'old' disc on the 'old' computer was indeed a problem, and the 'new' drive we bought to replace it was also bad. That answers why that machine has misbehaved...and as usual with computers' most mysterious problems, it nests in some underlying assumption of the human beings involved---in this case, our childlike faith that the drive we bought to replace a chancy drive wouldn't be bad right out of the box. It also goes right along with my memory of prior experiences in computer-building, that the parts of the operation that most people are afraid to touch---installing the chip and hooking up the wires---is not a problem. It's the ordinary things that most people do, like simply replacing a hard drive, that blow up and cause us our problems---because the natural thing is to suspect the delicate items and the notoriously futzy sound/video items. Maxtor will send us a new drive. One item down.
Date: 12/22/03...............................123,195. I was kidnapped---hauled off before I could so much as open my file---and presented with a shopping list and a stack of packages to mail, namely the promised cookies, which must not be allowed to go crumbly, and a few last moment purchases that had to be gotten. We haven't even talked about Christmas dinner, at which there will be guests. We got to the post office, which looked like the boarding line for the Titanic---way too many. We ducked back out with the stated intention of going at a less popular hour. Off to the shopping strip---Spokane has a couple of big malls, but the old strip has better parking and more interesting shops. And I got to play smug and I've-finished, while Jane searched for her last-minute items. Which didn't mean I came out empty-handed. But we got over to the Arena and got tickets for Stars on Ice, which we greatly enjoy, and this year remembered to get a whole week before the event---and we went over to a hair salon Jane is investigating. She wants to get a new do. It looks like a place that doesn't put hair up in curlers, at least. And then we tried laying Armstrong laminate flooring over the truly nasty grease-gray kitchen carpet. We know it's clean---we've scrubbed it, steamed it, parboiled it---but it just is that nasty color, and if you cook Italian, spatter happens. I just can't think of all the stuff landing back down in those fibers, but it is very short-nap carpet, so we got the brilliant notion of getting laminate wood flooring and laying it in a work-area pad right in the heart of the cooking-and-washing zone. This is a great idea, and brightens the whole kitchen, but getting those strips all to interlock is a pain---and the manufacturer's suggestion involves glue, which we can't use on the establishment's carpet, and brute force, which we have applied, to little if no avail. We may just have to accept some tiny seam-lines. But there we are, a few days before Christmas and guests---if the weather holds---and we have everything definitively done. Jane's cleanup of the office was truly epic, and it looks fit for human occupation. We got the packages mailed at the local grocery. The place is picked up, the floors are presentable, everything shipshape and all the stacks have vanished. The main computer is functioning with encouraging stability, the work area looks organized, the papers are in files, with labels, no less, and no cheating and dumping a stray paper into a somewhat related category---everything is absolutely where it belongs. Holidays are always a hard time to get work done---I've never quite had a book at this stage right at the holidays with incoming guests before, and it's kind of a frustrating thing. I want to do both---holiday and work---and the only thing I can say is that the holidays are a marvelous excuse to do the housecleaning.
Date: 12/23/03.........................................123,743. At least a little done. Certain strategic decisions made. Jane's hair adventure turned out very nice---she's happy. She's a little behind in her webpage...been snowed under trying to get the computers we built to do the jobs they were designed for, one of which is rescuing all the precious old and outdated Christmas records from her family---which survived quite a number of children and some hard usage. The Hoontech sound card has had its hair-pulling moments, but it is capable of removing all the hiss and pop from abused records, and is turning out some good copy. Our ultimate goal is to commit all our vastly bulky VCR and record boxes to a neat stack of DVDs and CDs, which will save us quite a lot of storeroom space, and protect particularly the family items....Two days before Christmas and weather is about to set in that could make our guests' arrival iffy. But we plan as if they're coming. His Imperial Highness Efanor, our 17 pounder, has burrowed himself a spot among the presents under the tree, and suddenly discovered he could spin the fiber-optic Christmas tree in its socket. This from our otherwise well-behaved fellow, who turns out to have been quietly unwrapping the packages as he kicks them about to gain room and a comfy spot. Her Furry Grace, Ysabel, has discovered her place on a lighted shelf, which produces a comfy warmth when turned on, so Efanor's conquest of the tree doesn't tempt her... I have to do one bit of holiday shopping, at the supermarket, to stock the fridge---we're still staying pretty well to the diet, and were good through Thanksgiving and the cookie baking. Now we just plan one binge---a few cookies and a waffle breakfast---and hope it doesn't make us sick. Prolonged virtue can have that effect. But thus far we are now in good shape. 
Date: 12/24/03...........................................123,743. Christmas Eve. Last-moment rush, and Jane's sustained attack on the housecleaning really did wonders. She's quite talented at figuring out electrical systems, and got our glumly unlit lighted pedestals relighted, and the place cleaned up and brightened up...I did the routine things like the kitchen, but she vowed getting all the round-tuits tuit'ed was her particular holiday goal, and the common room looks positively refurbished, what with the light under things that should be lit, the boxes all conveyed to storage, and with all the arrangements and bright illumination arranged. I'm terribly impressed. I did the shopping---went out and got some steaks for Christmas dinner---and didn't realize that some of our guests may favor salad over broccoli, so Jane went out to get salad. Which proved the critical point of the day, since while she was out, I evidently didn't hear the front door bell---not an uncommon situation, since my room is clear at the back---and the postman hastily slipped us a note and took off with the package he should have left.... Which meant that we had to trek out after it. In the meanwhile we decided that Christmas eve out could start a little earlier since the post office closed at 5:00 and the restaurant of choice closed at 4:00, at opposite ends of town, of course. But we had a nice supper, most of which we brought home, since it was early---we don't have the appetites we once had, pre-diet---and off we went to the post office...  The package turned out to be from our friends in Oklahoma, which we were ever so glad to have, and everything is safely here. We hope the cookies got there... I didn't get a thing done today, except just to clean up things, and we are hoping our company can make it through the passes before the turn in weather. The computers are both still working. I spent a little time today making a list of all the programs I have on the laptop, so that I can back up those things that need backup before I do the general reinstall and reformat.... Outside of that, we're looking forward to our particular Christmas tradition, the ceremonial viewing of The Lion in Winter. We're going to postpone the waffle breakfast until our company can join us. But tomorrow is prezzies and a good bacon and egg feast. We don't know how many guests we're getting, but we'll cope. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and fortune favor you extravagantly in this season when we think of new years, new beginnings, and old friends.
Date: 12/25/03............................123,743. Christmas Day. And, no, I'm not working today. I'm cooking. Weather relented, and our company got through. Jane and I had a few prezzies this morning so I could report to my family---and then her brothers arrived, so we had Christmas Part II. I'm taking a breather before beginning dinner, which is my contribution to the day, which has been a nice one---quiet, sedate---so she writes, as the cannonfire from Pirates of the Caribbean resounds from the living room---but what are holidays for? Jane and I decided we'd spent so much on computers we'd economize for Christmas, so we bought each other things that were deeply on sale---things that we can use, once I figure out the instructions. Holiday Cheer to us all, and it's only a week left until New Year's. PS: The things we find out about in each other's journals---Jane does one of the most skillful present-sneaks in the county.  Besides the plexi, she got me a GPS attachment for my Palm Pilot, which is going to be immensely neat. Complicated, however. It took me thirty minutes to figure out how to get my Palm out of the GPS unit once I experimentally popped it in, and of all the instructions they included, one did not involve the release catches...but no damage done. I look forward to this electronic gadget immensely---being able to find fairly remote places on short schedule with far less worry. What sold me on the devices is Seattle streets...not to mention trying to find convention hotels in various strange cities. Well, and the time we ended up on a remote mountain road in Utah in the dark with no idea where our shortcut came out. The Cedar Breaks figured on one roadsign that led off onto a road seemingly more precarious than the one we were on, and we reached a major highway finally, but by then, even the cats were worried. Henceforth we will be able to know where we are when we are lost....As for holiday adventures, my gift-sneaking was amazingly tame. Saying I was going to the grocery store, I kited clear across town to the local computer store and snatched up Jane's destined present with laser-like accuracy---the present being, most appropriately, considering our last couple of months, one of those wonderful little pen-drives---the little keychain devices you plug into a USB port and that function as a recognized drive of amazing capacity. A safety backup and a fast means of getting data moved about---particularly useful, again, on trips, where things may need to get moved or safeguarded without the faithful housenet. It was also a whole lot easier to hide and transport...I brought it in amongst the groceries, and was, thanks to my speed-shopping, only a few minutes late. Sneaking in ten feet of plexiglass cabinet lid and keeping it hidden---I'm amazed.
Date: 12/26/03.............................123,743. Waked late, waffles and bacon, way off diet...and lazed about, trying to get the GPS software to load. Cranky in the extreme, but I loaded it. And the Palm wouldn't hotsync. Frustration. First time that's happened. So I fumed, went to the internet, read all the instructions, which were entirely misleading, and if I'd followed those suggestions I'd be in trouble---but it made me think of the various softwares I've put on the laptop, and how software additions frequently uncheck things that are checked and otherwise play games with settings. So I just called up the hotsync software and had a look, rechecked what I thought should be checked, and lo and behold! It hotsync'ed and transferred files, and the GPS located our position. I always knew we were a shade under 2000 feet elevation, and there we are, about 40 feet short of that. Marvelous. We live in a science fictional age. And the confounded fancy GPS still can't locate our street, but hey, you can't have everything, and it is a short street....We thought we were going to see Lord of the Rings, but we got stuck in a traffic jam, the parking lot was full, and we went on to the mall, which was even worse---so we just had an early supper and went back home to watch Kangaroo Jack, an elevating moral tale. I'm still trying to get the GPS to find meaningful directions, but first I have to decide where I want to go. So there...I really want to write, but I'm going to take days to recover from way too much food, way too much sugar on an Atkins Diet lifestyle---right now I don't think I want anything else sugary for the rest of my life...and I hope to recover both wits and physiological wellbeing over the next few days. Christmas was a success, I think. But I feel way over-indulged.
Date: 12/27/03............................123,743. More breakfast, way too much breakfast. I think it's encouraging I could only eat half of it...and used to finish that particular order. We sent our guests off before the snow hit---they had a car windshield-wiper completely fly off halfway home, but got it repaired, and they made it home safely, so all's well that ends well...We went to our respective rooms and hibernated for a while, in recuperation....Now I plan a quiet evening, recuperation, and hope for more energy tomorrow. I'm very anxious to get back to work. But the house, good news, is not a wreck. We only have to do a bit of laundry and we're left with a place in much better condition than before the holidays....We want to get back to the theater and see Master and Commander one more time before it leaves the big screen---it really deserves it. But we're hoping holiday traffic will subside a bit. Yesterday was daunting. This morning very little was stirring on the streets.
Date: 12/28/03...........................126,125. Back at work, and closing in on the ending. It will lose a few thousand words when I trim the next book's outline off the bottom of the file, but a book outline is negligible compared to the length of a novel, so no great loss there. It feels good to get back at it---writers are such wretched people when we have story bottled up and ready to go...A quiet day, a work day, a no-treats day: we're nose-to-the-grindstone now and, alas, back on the diets with a vengeance, no more waffles, no more wine with dinner. I'm cooking again: no more restaurants, either. I gained seven whole pounds in two weeks of lapse, and that's going to have to go before I even contemplate New Year's. It looks as if it's going to be cheese and water---not even bread's allowed... The weather's conducive to work: the sky's dropped an inch or so of snow on us, high of thirty, clearing this afternoon, but colder. The apartment is in pretty good order, and we're not doing anything to disorder it for the next couple of weeks. I am going to have to get to the taxes in a day or so, but I'm hoping to get the book finished first. But it's not all hard effort: we settled down this evening to watch The Fellowship of the Ring, the extended version, which pretty well did for the evening, and plan to watch the second epic tomorrow evening---since it gets dark here at 4:30 in the afternoon, it's a nice time to watch long movies.
Date: 12/29/03..........................122,915. Finished! Of course this always means a little going back and trimming up, editing the last bit written since the last time I did an editing pass, but for all practical purposes, the book is finished...And then, as afore promised, I backed everything up, and just for an adventure, formatted C and reinstalled Windows and all my programs, hoping to stabilize this computer. I started that process somewhere around 2pm, hit only one glitch when the only serial number I couldn't come up with in records was---you guessed it---the Windows serial number. Fortunately a call to Dell produced records which produced a number, and after that things have gone in with very little problem. I don't know whether it will solve all the problems, but the fact that preformatting checks couldn't find certain addresses on the hard disk indicated that I might have run my luck to the edge of the cliff, in postponing a reinstall until after finishing the novel. The essential programs are in, the machine hasn't crashed yet, I'm back on the rock-steady housenet, and I've  not only gotten to the internet, but---if you can read this---you can assume I've gotten Frontpage to find my page and update it. I'm very pleased with myself, and Jane only had to bail me out once, getting the housenet up. We watched The Two Towers this evening and if luck and the weather hold, will see The Return of the King tomorrow.
Date: 12/30/03.........................122,915. Giving it a day or so before I go back to edit, just to approach it with a certain distance. Write in heat, edit cold. The computer is behaving well, except on the internet, where it absolutely refuses to load the mlb.com site, and I'm beginning to suspect that one of the problems is Microsoft's IE version 6, which was buggy the first time I installed it, and now I wish I hadn't installed the update over my IE5 install. And just to make my life interesting, my accounting program believes we have one more tax day before the yearr end, after it just printed out the tax check. I then  printed out all the records and am going to have to go through them looking for the point at which the glitch happened. The computer problems earlier this fall, when we had to rebuild and reinstall, are the likely point at which the program lost its mind. But assuming that could be itself a mistake. I'll just have to see. Quel pain! On the positive front, did get to the movies, and greatly enjoyed Return of the King. I won't say a thing on that score, but if you haven't seen it, I recommend it without reservation.
Date: 12/31/03........................122,915. New Year's Eve, and I spent most of the days trying to iron out the accounting software...well, most of it until Jane pointed out we had these movie tickets about to expire, and she wanted to go back and see Return of the King again...so we did. And enjoyed it as much the second time. After that, we decided, since it was five-ish, that we might stand a chance of getting into our favorite restaurant, and we did, with no trouble---a case of bail out of the car at the curb, go in and grab a table in the bar while Jane parked, and we just made it before the place became packed. We went home, and Jane, the rascal, had bought a blueberry bundt cake, one of our favorite vices, and a bottle of champagne, and we watched movies until the midnight hour, watched distant fireworks from the downtown from our own warm front window, and saluted the New Year. Happy New Year to you all, and here's for 2004.
Date: 1/1/04.............................122,915. New Year's Day, and heavy snowfall. I love it. We sat around most of the day, well, I did---Jane's been much more productive than I have the last few days. I can't say we've done much except a little tidying up and a lot of watching old movies. Dinner, my cooking, was so bad I couldn't eat it. Purple cauliflower is right off the menu, as far as I'm concerned. I enjoy designer vegetables as much as the next person, but that was vile. I'm about ready to get back to work. Got to get the end-of-year accounts finished up, and then back to the pre-turn-in edit.
Date: 1/2/04............................123,838. Back to work. It's the little tiny changes that make the book make sense. Still have to do the accounts, though I'm well on the way. I carefully stacked the essential bills and papers---well, I stacked them, and then the cats played slip-and-slide among the stacks. Precisely at 9pm every evening, Efanor starts knocking off objects from shelves, and if we don't pay attention, he escalates to larger objects. 'Pay attention' means 'feed us' or else. Ysabel always parks somewhere far removed from the mayhem and waits, visions of kibbles dancing in her little slit eyes....It snowed and snowed and Jane took a shovel and unburdened the walk, and then brushed snow off her car and our several neighbors. Not entirely altruism, she says: she prefers to know where the snow is going to land. The other car is under the carport---and with half a foot of snow on the roof, I'm beginning to hope that roof is sturdier than it looks....We went to see Stars on Ice, through ice and snow of our own. It's a good show. Alexei Yagudin, Kurt Browning, Todd Eldridge...the guys, as usual, stole the show. But they had no lack of good pairs, Sikharulidze & Berezhnaya, Sale & Pelletier, Ino and Zimmerman....Go see it when it gets to your city. On television, the prevalence of close-ups doesn't let you see the sweep of movement on the ice, which is a whole new dimension. If you've never been to one of these shows, get seats about halfway up the first tier on the fifty-yard line...It was cold when we went, colder when we got back, and the snowplows and deicing trucks are losing the battle. The big blue spruce that stands taller than our third floor balcony is a beautiful sight, covered in snow.
Date: 1/03/04..........................124,665. Amazing how the days before the new year seemed to tumble by so fast, as if there was no time left, and now the new year seems full of time. Things are getting done. Work is happening. I don't feel so crushed and harried---in spite of the fact certain things, notably the accounting, still have unfinished bits. Maybe it's the snow. Half a foot. Subzero cold at night. And even the streets are staying covered. I went to the store, only a few blocks down, and considering the condition of the parking lot, accepted the sacker's offer to carry-out for me, counting that I was going to carry them far enough when I got home. So out we go, and ahead of us, this older gentleman has chosen to push a cart to his car, which, given the usual condition of the carts, the uphill route and rapid slope-off toward the service entry on that side, was quite a labor. Then someone with obscured windows decided to back out toward him, which meant he had to veer, lost control of his cart sideways down the slope...in short, we nearly had vegetables every which way. Another gentleman and I,   not my  lad with my grocerries, grabbed the veering cart and began to tow it up hill as the first gentleman pushed, and the three of us had trouble getting it up that slope...it was that deep and icy, to boot.  Jane had gone out to shovel the parking area of our own apartment complex---her chance to play in the snow---and she raised a ridge half as tall as she is, on either side of our walk. That may be there until March. Our creek, below the balcony, is completely frozen over, the first time that's happened. For the first time since we've lived here, we're leaving the heat on at night. Jane is very sore---one can't imagine why.
Date: 1./04/04......................126,199. A slow day, a good deal accomplished, work-wise. Haven't stirred out of the house, scarcely out of the chair where I work. I don't know if I'm going to turn in the current manuscript before I get the next one started, since the start of the middle book depends a great deal on the ending of the first---and no, I'm not about to give away a thing. But sometimes I don't know how I'm going to be able to start a second book: I have to try it and see where the cast and crew want to be standing when it starts, and they don't always give me good information until I actually start to work. I say that I outline my stories. But Bren and company, not unlike others of my teams, have their own notions of timing and endings and starting-points, notions which get increasingly independent as story progresses...and increasingly, as I go through a related set of books, I don't find it possible to follow the outline. Cast and crew get together at midnight and plot when I'm not listening---consciously, that is. And when I start to follow my former outline,  it turns out they have other plans. Sigh. And I have to get other inspiration and rethink---fast, or grow quite unhappy. See note on writer when plot is NOT working, above...But there is a solution. I've mentioned the bannik, I think, the Russian shower-spirit that gives you information only in the presence of lots of steam and hot water. The Russians are quite right, understand. We're sure ours moved with us from Oklahoma---a well-behaved bannik, who could not possibly be responsible for the hair-raising diversion in Nebraska, he hastens to inform us---it could only have been a mischievous polevik [field-spirit, should you wonder]---and who was only too content to resume housekeeping in the north with a couple of appreciative writers. Now in this snowy chill, I'm beginning to get small nudges from the resident bannik, and think I shall be able to start that next book very soon...she says quite hopefully. Most of all---I should be able to start it without distraction. We've recovered from holidays, have only to undo the decorations, but we ethically have until Valentine's as an absolute deadline. So we're not too worried...Jane and I both have been finishing a story. And now we're about to be at the front end of  our respective novels, just the same, which doesn't happen often....A note. When I do start the next book, I intend to folderize the account of the current book and put it as a link in this area. This journal has been an intriguing concept. I think I'll continue it through the next book: it keeps me honest about my word count and my progress. I am also finalizing the title of the current book, for all of you who have asked me what it is. I have a few possibilities in mind, and I will say what my decision is before, as seems near now, I close this volume of the journal.
Date: 1/05/04..........................126,199. Well, I might have been finished, but the replacement Maxtor drive came in, and the tax deadline approaches, and the 'old' new Maxtor drive has to be returned to Maxtor by return mail, which means Jane has to a) check the new 'new' drive, b)check the old 'new' drive against a change in motherboards just to be sure, then c) clean the old 'new' drive and pack it for return, which means d) backing up everything on it onto the 'little' drive, and preparing to do some general drive-moving, which will ultimately mean checking the 'old' drive that's currently in the 'new' computer, to be sure it's ok, but it can only be checked if we e) back it up, then f) run the diagnostic, g) save it if it's ok, or replace it if it's not. But before we do THAT, it seemed a good idea for me h) to get the credit cards reconciled for year end, since that data is on a drive that we're going to have to back up and wipe with the diagnostic and we can't use the cursed SATA drive until we get XP on that machine---are you possibly following this mess? But j) the backup from which we had restored the accounting files had lost every single reconciliation since 1999, and I spent the next three hours putting that back in, only to discover that we're missing the two paper statements from 2003 that I knew were lost and had ordered the backup copies for---at 3.00 a swat. They arrived during the preholiday computer meltdown, got moved during the clearance for company, and didn't get entered, and now the copies are missing. So k) I ordered two more, fixed what I could and now Jane is going to do the bank account reconciliations l) so that we can finally back this wretched disk up and see if it's defective. Where, I asks it, is my prior reconciliations? Ha! I suspect  a disk glitch....Jane says she's not so sure... But anyway, very little else got done, except that Jane made it through steps a)-g) and I made it most of the way steps h)-k), except for April and March. Jane is now working on l). I am going to be working m) on supper. It got down near -20 last night---we wrestled our huge red peace rose pot into the apartment, to protect it, and we hope it survives the transitions. The weather is going to be continued cold, with daily highs in the single digits, the creek is definitely frozen, there's half a foot of snow on the ground, and more coming---and since we don't have to be out in it and we did our grocery shopping before this hit, we see no need to rush out into the arctic air, except to the mail box and back. It's crisp out there! But it's a very nice day to get the necessities done, and we are making progress...at least we know what's missing.
Date: 1/06/04...................126,199. If you've read Jane's journal, you know that the day got even better...the new 'new' Maxtor drive that we were going to switch for the 'old' new Maxtor drive? It failed its initial diagnostics, so back it goes into the box to return to Maxtor for yet another replacement, and at this point, thank you, we just want a drive that works---and we want it now. It has continued cold, the high for the day being 5 degrees, counted a warming trend---and snow has started again, or rather frozen bits have come down like so much coarse sand. I've never seen snowplow ridges down the principle lanes of the town before, substantial ones, which make it appear it will be weeks before anyone can change lanes in town...But with the drive malfunction, waiting another couple of weeks for Maxtor to ship us another drive was just too frustrating, so I volunteered to go off to the computer store to get a drive, so that when Maxtor sends us the other, we can use it otherwise. So off I go. Our car being all-wheel drive, it's no great difficulty to drive the ice-corrugated roads, but the number of crazy people who view an ice hazard as their cue to go faster than ever (so they can get off the hazardous streets faster, one supposes) is truly a wonder to a southerner. I learned to drive on ice, from year one---Oklahoma has some good ice storms, and I'm what I rate as careful, but not fearful on ice. I drove generally 25 to 30, a fairly brisk rate for downtown conditions, considering it's also the speed limit on dry pavement---and I kept getting passed by people doing 40. Amazing. I know these people won't do that in high summer. And finding they can't lane-dodge because of the snow-piles seems to make them even crazier. Ah, well....But I got the drive. Myself: "Can I return this if it fails diagnostics? If it doesn't work?" The clerk: "Yes, within 14 days, but there's a 10 percent restocking fee." Myself: "You restock drives that don't work?" Them: "Well, you can exchange it, up to 14 days." Myself: "With no restocking fee?" Them: "Well, you can buy a service policy..." And so it went. Seems to me a piece of merchandise that fails on install ought to be returnable, no question. Restocking fees for a broken drive, my aunt Sally. So, well, I got the part, and got their assurance that we can bring it back if it doesn't work. This is, as you see above, about all I got done today, since by the time I stopped by to mail some items and pick up some things at the grocery, I was so chilled through that  a doubled feather comforter didn't convince my physiology that I ought not to go into hibernation. I didn't sleep well last night, and being so cold, I made up for it after getting back. That was a precious waste of a day. But the good news is, the 'new' new drive passed the diagnostics with both motherboards, and Jane now has the motherboard she wants in the 'old' computer, and a drive we know works married to it and taking data. So now she's happily installing Win98 onto that drive, and we will have some assurance that that computer will stay stable. This gives us a place to back up various files off the 'new' computer while we diagnose its drives to be sure of them. It will be a few days until I get the copies of the credit card bills that I need to finish the accounting. With luck, they will get here before too long. In the meanwhile, I hope to get some work done tomorrow...maybe even to get the book done to my satisfaction. I'm still thinking about the title.
Date: 01/07/04..............................126585. A wee bit of progress, which took half the day. Then I had to go in and wrestle the accounting. I finally, by arranging checks and assigning numbers to each, discovered that the computer is right: we still owe the government money, but we're not past the deadline to pay it. I never made mistakes when I maintained a handwritten ledger book. This high-falutin' computer with its stingy, windows-ridden screens that just won't compact material closely enough for you to really get a large-scale look at things makes it really hard to see. Or maybe I need to get my glasses checked. The other thing this program does is refuse to let me just delete erroneous paychecks---oh, no, they have to stay visible, with zeroes in them. This occasionally makes it look as if they're real. "This program won't let......" is usually a red cape in the face of the bull, so to speak---rare that I can't get a program to do something it's not supposed to, but I'm rather loath to tinker with the accounting, in the theory that there could be a legal-records reason for it. In this case I don't think so, but as in most instances when this has annoyed me, I'm rather under pressure to get the result, and have no leisure to pursue the software. The weather continues cold, but warming---it no longer frost-burns your hand to hold it against the window. It's lovely out there, pine and spruce all done up like a holiday card, frosted with white, the roads all white. I wish I had the leisure to take off to a ski resort and take lessons. But alas, as often stops me, end of year accounting and recovering the down-time from a novel is all-consuming. But I'm feeling like working again, holidays are past, and having won the round with the computer and seeming as if I may actually get the accounts in order fairly easily this year, I'm feeling quite cheerful. The hard drive works, we have two malfunctioning drives packed up for shipment to Maxtor the next time one of us gets out to the post office, and Jane has finally gotten the computer mess off her back, I hope, for a comparatively long time....well, at least until the replacement drives come in. I'm editing the last chapter now, and we will see if I get through today.
Date: 01/08/04.................................126,719. Got a bit more, before I hit a do-I? or don't I? stall point, a decision I have to make about sequence. So Jane wanted to get the two bad hard drives mailed, and we went down to the store/post office, which was a bit of a mission---we'd run out of half a dozen things we never could remember to get at the store, and this time we were determined to come back with them: score? About 90%. But we got the stuff mailed. And I decided since the deadline is approaching I had to resolve that accounting problem. So I got out some old-fashioned ledger paper and wrote down the account items that were giving me fits. That gave me the check number sequence of supposedly missing checks, and when I went to the computer,  no, they weren't there. But when I went to the check stubs, lo and behold, they were. So somehow in bringing the accounting up from the backup files, those two checks were not in the batch. Now all I have to do is put them in and see if the balances come out right in the tax calculations. Blunt force math, when all the fancy systems go awry. Jane has launched herself on the noble mission of trying to identify duplicate files in our vast collection of photo backups. When we first got the digital cameras, we tended to back up ten and more times, in the fear that somehow our pictures would evaporate when we weren't looking. We have now come over to a sure confidence that a picture is a picture, whether it resides on disk or on paper. I think a really good catalogue of backups would be a wonderful thing. And I'm really hoping manufacturers don't hand us anything beyond CDs and DVDs for a while, because the 5 1/4 to 3.5 floppy to CD to DVD transition has left us with records in all sorts of media. We finally gave up on the 5 1/4, believing we have gotten everything off that was worthwhile---but just in case---we do have a viable 5 1/4 drive somewhere in storage. Well, well, if Jane can just find the file-comparison software that fills her needs, we may have neater files.
Date: 01/09/04..................................127,551. Every day another hundred words or so. I reached the critical point of decision about how to start the next book and decided to wait for a clearer head tomorrow...granted one arrives. In the meanwhile I went in and attacked the accounts, namely the mixed up pay/tax categories. I searched. I entered checks that hadn't been entered. It only got worse. Then I got into the 'details' button and found out that no matter what I told it about the check in question, it was retaining some dates that were in this year, not the year I'm trying to work with, and occasionally, just for fun, dropping the matter into the wrong account entirely. This program can be such a headache during its setup phase, and granted the computer crashes and the reinstalls, yes, it is again the set-up phase. I have to bully it until it conforms to reality, and my profound sympathies to anyone attempting to learn this program cold. So, well, after looking into every nook and hidden cranny in which the program might have saved or preserved information about the checks, I almost got it---then I discovered I'd deleted the wrong checks. If you think getting new checks in is a mess, try getting it to restore category-checks that have been voided. Another chase through the underbrush of the program, until I discovered that, yes, there is a way back from that disaster, one of those little 'undocumented features' that you tend to find in a program when you're just about mad enough to take a hammer to the keyboard. It worked. I not only recovered from that mistake, I was able to get into the hitherto undeletable 'junk' that's cluttered up the account and just get the fossils out, instead of perpetually having to line through them on all the printouts. So, another small victory. We're watching "Strictly Ballroom" tonight, one of our old favorites. Last night it was "Indiana Jones" 1, which I haven't seen in way too long. I don't know what to do with myself now that I've got the accounting mostly ready to take to the bank and the mailbox...but I'll think of something. It's about time we got free time enough to take on the ship model Jane got. Outside, the weather's been warmer, melting an inch or so of the snow that fell, and it's supposed to be sunny tomorrow, snowy at night, and so on with rain and snow alternating all week...and I've learned one thing: this end of Washington has changeable weather, even more so than Oklahoma, so I don't bet strongly that this will hold true. I've got a stack of email weeks old that's been backed up awaiting attention. Maybe tomorrow I'll make a dent in that. I'm about to archive this journal section, as I will when I finish the book, so don't get alarmed if you come back in a couple of days and find only a button referring to this segment of the journal...just punch it and you'll have it back. It's so long, this seems the best bet. Jane tried writing hers in inverse order and got complaints, so now she puts her newest segment first, but I'm not that coordinated with the Move function---I'm just as apt to lose it. So by archiving, I'll at least make less work scrolling for you dedicated followers of this epic.
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PROGRESS REPORT
All contents copyright 2004 by C.J. Cherryh
Last update: 01/10/2004
One of those questions a writer gets asked (a lot) besides the one we all dread, "where do you get your ideas?" is "how long does it take to write a novel?" Well, I thought it might amuse my readers to know. First, how long is a novel? 80,000 words up to infinity. A book 3/4 of an inch thick is about 80,000 words. A book an inch and a half thick is about 120,000 words. How many words on a page of manuscript? About 325, doublespaced.
So---say that your target length is about 100,000 words or more.
And how much does a writer write a day? Bear in mind that sometimes you go backwards, and rip out 10,000 words. Sometimes you go forward, and gain 3. Words, that is.
Sometimes it's fast, sometimes it's slow. Sometimes you don't get anything done. Bear in mind I write full time. But I have to do other things, too. So I thought I'd just let you see for a while how progress goes.
I'm working on an untitled Foreigner manuscript.

Date: 10/13/03.....................Word count: 80,000. (rounded off)

Date: 10/14/03.........................................83,901...a good writing day, never mind the doing the bills and an hour on the phone with a misapplied payment.

Date: 10/15/03.........................................84,738...an appointment, and a pleasant drive.

Date: 10/16/03.........................................86,019...a good day, if distracted by groceries and baseball playoffs. It also rained, thank goodness.

Date: 10/17/03.........................................86,658...slower, but it always is at a chapter start. Don't be surprised if I'm late posting the next two or three days.

Date: 10/18/03.........................................86,658....convention. Not a shred of work done.

Date: 10/19/03..........................................86,658...convention......and a late party.

Date: 10/20/03..........................................86,658...convention.......and shopping for and wiring a ceiling fan, to get some air circulation, a long-postponed job grown necessary, given the nasty weather lately. I tolerated summer. It's fall, there should be snow, and it's still too warm. My definition of 'too warm' is above 68 degrees.

Date: 10/21/03..........................................86,658...one of the bad things about conventions is that it takes a full day, or two, to remember the precise next phrase you were going to write. And if you had a lengthy trip, even more so. This was an in-town convention and I lost 4 days' work......sigh. They're fun, but no progress is no income. Back to work...there's a mini heatwave, to my disgust, but the new ceiling fan will improve my humor.

Date: 10/22/03.........................................86,701...the thought I had before the convention has still not reappeared. Rack up five days of no progress. I'm trying, but yesterday having to get the car in for an oil change was a two hour chunk of time right when I was most likely to have made a breakthrough. Frustrating.

Date: 10/23/03.........................................87,219....slow recovery. Very slow. I always try to leave things where the next sentence is self-evident, but in this case it wasn't as evident as I thought. Sigh.

Date:10/24/03.........................................88,097.....Jane's birthday. And what work got done?

Date:10/25/03.........................................88,097.....driving trip, Jane reading and taking notes, me driving and commenting.

Date:10/26/03.........................................88,097....visit with relatives.

Date:10/27/03.........................................88,097...driving home, reading and taking notes

Date:10/28/03..........................................88,097...driving trip, reading and taking notes....AND...the special surprise: the housenet computer goes into diskscan, informs us it has surface damage on the main disk, warns us of impending crash, and this, of course, right before the end-of-month tax reports. We're thrilled. Fortunately we have a second hard drive that can suck down the data, preparatory to fixing the situation...which wasn't what we'd planned for tomorrow.

Date: 10/29/03..........................................88,097...Jane resolutely labors over the computer. I try to remember where I was in my book, what was going to happen, what everyone's name is, and try not to think about bills and tax reports. It's amazing how inevitably when I have downtime from a convention the next week is pure chaos.

Date: 10/30/03..........................................89,330...launched again. We're invited to a Halloween party, but I just can't, and it's hard to explain, but if you look at everything since 10/18, you'll see the reason. A little mental disturbance is like an earthquake in a china shop---and it takes forever to get the delicate structures and apparently magical connections put back in place, because no outline withstands a party or a computer crisis. The little bit of reading on someone else's work, no problem; but relinquishing my storyline for a revel---big problem: all the threads drop, make a puddle of same-colored yarn, and there we are, no progress for days. So I can't make that party. But, oh, it feels good when the story moves again. Y'know, writers are strange people. We can't tell a non-writer why we're glum (story isn't happening) or in a wonderful mood (it's ripping along.) No wonder there are so many divorces when a person suddenly becomes a writer and launches into that lifestyle bigtime. No wonder writer-types don't correspond or return phone calls for months, and then suffer guilt and further procrastination. But right just above, you have the whole tale of the reasons why. We're not manic-depressive. But we sure look like it. And a person who isn't self-confident and self-entertaining with a lot of personal passions and distractions, particularly one who begins to feel neglected and resentful when a writer-spouse is locked in story, is in trouble. If you've ever wondered why writers and artists tend to domicile together, here you have it. One of us emerges from quarters in the morning, snaps: "Don't talk to me," walks to the kitchen, gets a drink, and dives back into own room: is that a fight? A snit? No, not at all. The other one thinks, Oh, how wonderful. Story's going. And says not a word and is only envious.

Date:10/31/03.............................................90,396....and on to Halloween.

Date:11/1/03...............................................90,717.....well, you know what I said above, about crises? We installed a simple program on one computer. It didn't work right. We installed it on one of our working computers that has more speed. It screwed both computers, on one of which it doesn't work right and the other of which it corrupted the Media Player. This morning, the faithful word processor created a folder it couldn't find, and the kicker? What it can't find is the working manuscript. Jane gets that back. This while trying to work on a really critical scene. Meanwhile I'm trying to find info on the software company, like a support number, and their website is impossible to get into---who knows? Maybe 17,000,000 other irate users are trying to find out what happened when they installed the new software release? One computer insists on running Scandisk on boot, and can't be dissuaded. Mine is thus far safe, but the frustration is immense...and we're networked. To add to the matter, Jane's new reading glasses, expensive titanium frames, cracked right over the nosepiece, just cracked, under a gentle push to slide them up her nose. The glass into which she poured remedial Scotch turned out to have plant fertilizer in it, and over all, there have been better days. I want a reboot of yesterday. You know, system reset, unplug and try it again? We're just so thrilled.

Date: 11/2/03................................................90,717....Sometimes you just have to sit down and laugh. The computer woes are still with us, but beginning to make sense. Jane got her scene done. I, meanwhile, got presents in the mail.......TWO, count them, two sets of galleys which need to be gone over meticulously, amounting to a stack of paper, oh, over half a foot high, beside my chair. And there's always the chance that the typesetters accidentally transposed a scene, which actually happened in one set of galleys, so you have to read them for sanity as well as the chance a copyeditor stuck in a comma that makes hash of the meaning of a particular sentence. It's enough to drive a body nuts. AND there's the sad fact that I'm, oh, at least a year past any consideration of those storylines, and I'll lose my carefully gathered story threads on the current novel if I'm not very careful. It's still almost impossible for it not to affect me.... The very worst was when 3 publishers rushed to get manuscripts into galleys before they left on holiday vacation, and my Christmas present was 3 sets of galleys, two of which were quite screwed up, and all of which needed to be done by the first week in January. In the present case, one of them is quite reasonable---I've got 30 days to get that set done. The other one, which is more likely to have problems, and on which I didn't have a chance to see copyedits, came with a 9 day deadline---and you can't fail these deadlines or stretch them: if the presses are ready to roll, they're ready, and you can't miss that date. So as the world goes, happy Halloween to me. Did I mention that just hours before this arrived in the mail I had one of those crystal clear moments which showed me the end of my current book and I was so looking forward to making a lot of progress?
Date: 11/3/03.................................................92,437....I haven't laid a finger on those galleys. I've decided the only thing I can do to keep my mind clear on my current work is to go back for a rolling re-write, ie, go back and polish from the beginning so I can do something relatively easy as I get the galleys done. I think this is going to work.
Date: 11/4/03.................................................93,296...and I got through 119 pages of the most urgent galley. I'm finding, thank goodness, that the text is clean. This is a reprint with some new material, and the text may be from the current imprint's files. This would eliminate typos, at least on the section I'm on, so this section is all right. The trick is to read without reading---to check grammar and punctuation and continuity literally in the hindbrain, avoiding the frontal brain, where current story remains in residence. The fact I used to grade student papers by the stack does help immensely in this process. It's a particular skill it's hard to describe, but it's more like typing while conversing---typing is hindbrain, lizard brain, and conversing is more frontbrain. Writing thoughts down means that hind and frontal brain are simultaneously active---which is, my theory, why when I'm writing, I can watch telly, totally lose track of time and place, and still type 100 wpm when the story is moving. During those intervals of rapid keystrokes and story flowing the house could catch fire and I wouldn't know it, nor would I be able to say what was on the telly: the telly is white noise. But rewriting is more like galley-checking, meaning more hindbrain involvement, looking for tags, names, places, linkages between scenes, straightening up connections....mostly hindbrain but still keeping the lamp lit in the frontal brain, awareness of story and memory happening up there, while low-level recognition happens in the hindbrain. Is that bizarre enough? I think it's one reason why listening while driving is so efficient---occuping some of those circuits  actually aids concentration in others. And it's why inspiration so frequently arrives in the shower, when lizard-brain is enjoying the warm water. So, well, there you have it: evidence that writers in general have really strange brains, and why reality goes away when we're 'in story.' It's the ability not only to daydream, but to daydream with close, automatic connnection to the fingers, sort of like playing the piano with both hands and making up the melody as you go along.

Date: 11/5/03....................................................94,031....and I got to page 415 in the galley in a late-night session that lasted until 2am, at which point I discovered the ending of a section is missing, flat missing. This is a major crisis. Once something is in galleys, adding a page is a truly major problem, involving folios, the way the paper is arranged for printing in massive sheets before collation. Not only that, this involves short stories, and I don't have a copy of the story in question accessible. At something around midnight I wrote a letter to my publisher and passed the alarm, hoping they have a copy of the story with the missing ending. Did I mention I have to do the end-of-month IRS report today? And have the galleys ready and all problems solved before the 9th? I may have to make a storeroom foray, and dig into boxes that are under an eight-foot stack of boxes, at the very back of a very cold, packed-to-the-ceiling 10x10 storeroom, where my archive copies are. Did I mention writing can sometimes involve more exercise than sitting in a chair? PS: I got hold of my editor, who says she can find the story. Whew! But...the main computer, with the accounting software on it, is entering hard drive failure, and poor Jane, who should be working on her book, is shunting operations to the second drive, and trying to reconcile the accounts, while I try to finish the galleys so those can get into the mail. Chaos spreads. And the kitchen lighting went out, and there are no windows in there. Fixable, but a cursed nuisance. And I'm clinging to contact with my current novel by my fingernails.

Date: 11/6/03......................................................95,039....and I finished the galley in time to get the pages into the mail, all 644 pages of it. I'm tired. The tax report didn't get done...will have to be done tomorrow. Jane has spent all day shunting critical data from our hub computer into the second drive and trying to figure out what's the matter with the main drive. I think the answer is, "It's dead, Jane." I'm going to try to nurse the tax reports out of it, and then we're going to replace the drive and migrate everything onto the new one. Such fun. We're both exhausted. Neither of us has gotten as much writing done as we hoped this week. I've got one more galley to go. The last one had about 25 bad pages and the missing ending. Most of it, fortunately, was in good shape. And to my extreme relief, the second galley looks clean, so that won't be such a headache. It's also a little shorter. After the taxes, we'll be ripping the guts out of the main communications computer, which reminds us just how connected we're used to being...the very notion I can't tap a key and immediately reach the internet or a printer is kind of like...well, like flipping the kitchen light switch and having it not work. Got to fix that light... When I get a spare breath. Ciao.

Date: 11/7/03.....................................................95,039....and the adventure continues. Jane's brother had to go from Seattle to Salem OR to get his plane, which was with a mechanic down there, and you can't take a car to get a plane home, in the nature of things, so, well, we took another reading trip on Jane's manuscript, which involved first driving to Seattle....and hoping to pick up the needed computer parts there. It's 300 odd miles, and we got a late start, leaving behind essential things like glasses, etc, in our haste to get to Seattle before rush hour.  Just as we were doing some cleanup on our computers prior to leaving, we found an intruder on the housenet, and had to scramble to clean up our security, complicated by the fact---get this---with one of our computers using XP Home edition, we found we were wide open to such intrusions, and no way to prevent it except to bar that computer from our network. It's our newest computer. We are furious......and outbound, with one computer turned off, and the other two in our possession. We drove to Seattle through a not too bad rush. We got Jane's brother's car to the airport to leave for his return, and had supper...

Date: 11/8/03.....................................................95,039, but I got about 75 pages on the second set of galleys done. And we drove down to Salem, actually to a small airport nearby, had lunch with the mechanic who'd done the service, saw Jane's brother into his plane and drove back....did I mention silly me drove into the small town on fumes? So off we went, back to Seattle. But when we were in the heart of Portland traffic, we got a phone call from Jane's brother. It seems the airport he was going to turned out to be closed, so he'd had to land in Auburn. It's about 4 hours from Salem to Seattle, so he was going to have to wait until we got to Auburn to get him. The street in our instructions turned out not to exist, the building where he was was not apparent from the road, and fortunately, in the dark, he saw us and phoned before we looped out again. We drove on home, with the plane still stuck in Auburn and his car still in the hangar at the closed airport.

Date: 11/9/03...................................................95,039, and now up to page 150 of the galleys. We had breakfast out, ascertained the local airport was now open, and drove back to Auburn to deliver pilot to plane for a short hop home, after which Jane and I went looking for computer parts and technical answers for our security problems. We found both. It seems that XP Home doesn't have the same level of security protection as Windows 98, Win ME, or anything else we've ever used. If you're using XP Home, anybody can get in on your network, if you can get out, and rummage your files. So we're going to have to take measures, for sure. We're beyond annoyed. But off we go, back home again, reading all the way....and with at least a fix in hand for our first computer problem and for the new security problem, which may be solved by installing XP Pro, which has old-fashioned password protection. Take heed, if you're using XP Home. And the kitchen light is still out.

Date: 11/10/03..................................................95,039, still at page 150 of the galleys. Home again, only to discover we might have left Jane's coat and her keys in Seattle and a credit card in Ellensburg. Fortunately we found the card, but the coat and keys are in Seattle. And a power blip took out our network and our power backup system. A whole day spent on computers.

Date: 11/11/03..................................................96,337, still 150 of the galleys.....lovely computer problems and routine doctor visits for everyone. The chiropractor gets the back straightened out after all the typing. The sound card is in, the network is mostly up, and the power backup is functioning. We're making progress.

Date: 11/12/03..................................................96,449....150 of the galleys. The mainboard is in question, the computer can't read its drives properly, and we've reinstalled and hunted and stood in phone queues until we're frazzled, from morning until way late at night...boot and reboot, wire and rewire, and we've had it. Our motherboard people don't answer emails and their line is always busy, and I'm about ready to go get a new board and new chip, from someone who at least answers questions. Did I mention my brandnew fancy Hamilton Beach coffeepot died? A month and a half old, and it's dead. I can make coffee by heating water and pouring it through the grounds, but it's foul, Jim, foul. And me without proper caffeination is a very dangerous person to let on the phone with the motherboard people, whose Muzak sounds like it's hiccups at the watery bottom of a well, and whose advice is, well, not productive of anything but the desire to be with another motherboard company. I want to write! I don't want to fix computers! The fact you're seeing this is thanks to Linksys. Our housenet has proven unshakeable through all shutdowns and unpluggings and it somehow retained its logons. I love Linksys. I'm going to try to write, now. To blazes with the kitchen light. I can cook by the range light.

Date: 11/13/03....................................................96,449...150 of the galleys. For those of you who've been following this epic, you'll note I missed this date as if it didn't exist, which is how time flies if you're having fun....or rather, when your communications and your central computer are both out, rendering you incommunicado and thoroughly preoccupied with the problem. We spent hours on the phone trying to get this mess fixed, and still no joy: the computer still doesn't run the way it ought, the bios that ought to exist turns out not to be available on the motherboard site---it's listed, but it doesn't download when you ask it to. Translation, for those who don't speak computerese: the instructions that make our main computer talk to its new software and drives properly isn't up to snuff, there ought to be an upgrade to make it all work smoothly, and that upgrade is advertised but absent from the possibilities on the manufacturer's site. We're so thrilled. We have, however, ascertained that we have as good a bios as we can get on this board, and the thing runs, but not so it will handle the software we want to run, or manage its multiple drives the way it ought.  Our personal computers still work, and the house net is unshaken---but we're so busy trying to fix the main computer we haven't had time to work. This, since the power flux that started this mess, involves one hard drive, one power-backup, a sound card, a bios flash and a complete reload of programs, and after all that, we don't quite have a doorstop, but we aren't happy with the result, either. So why don't we just buy an off-the-shelf computer? Because we insist on knowing how the machines work, and it's good for the brain, if not the blood pressure...major credit to Jane, who can talk alphabet soup (DMA, AGP, front load bus and ultra-this-and-that) with the best of them. I'm competent enough with software problems, and can meander my way slowly through the hardware issues, but she honestly knows what the alphabet soup refers to---which means she sits and mutters darkly at the machinery's insides, and pulls and pushes cables, while I just sit and record the process in the notebook, so we can remember what we did...hardware installation not being one of those things we do often enough to remember off the top of our heads. And of course the terms and parts have all mutated by the time we need to work it over one more time and nothing we installed last time will work on the new boards.

Date: 11/14/03....................................................97,236....201 of the galleys, the halfway point on those. A reasonable tranquility on a peasoup foggy day, to which this region is prone in autumn, and we both got work done that didn't involve the misbehaving computer. I also finally got a decent pot of coffee: I had to get a new pot or go mad, and I intend to complain to the company that made a pot that died after a month and a half. But I'm not about to call the manufacturer today. I haven't talked to a tech support person for at least 24 hours, which is perfectly fine by me. We have ordered a new motherboard and CPU, plus memory necessary for the new motherboard, which of course won't take the memory we have, oh, no, no such thing. The new board will demand its own day of distraction when it comes in, but that won't be until next week.  In the meantime I made progress, and have remembered where I am in the novel, and actually wrote new words, which felt, oh, so good.

Date: 11/15/03.....................................................98,076......233 of the galleys. Peace and quiet. A cold, dank day with a lot of mist. And a good day writing.

Date: 11/16/03.....................................................101052.....296 of the galleys. Well, clearly this book is going to be longer than 100,000 words. It'll be as long as it needs to be, but there's a whole lot else that needs to happen, and I'm not there yet. A cold rainy day with a snow flurry, and a bitter cold evening. I had to duck out to the store, and frosted my fingers pumping gas. Love this weather.

Date: 11/17/03......................................................102182....and 400-something of the galleys, which are now finished. Cold, windy day, with the promise of rain, but no substance. My reward for finishing the galleys will be going to see Master and Commander sometime this week. I love the O'Brian books [see the Recommended list, elsewhere on this site] which are our favorite traveling reading, and I've been looking forward to this one for months. We love sailing ships in this household.. (Jane's birthday present was a wooden ship kit, and both of us are looking forward to actual time to get down to glue, rigging, and serious plank-bending. I saw one of these kits many years ago in a storefront in Cremona, Italy, and never, ever, ever forgot it, and it turns out they're available in the USA and are still being made. At the time, it was about 50.00 for the kit, and that would have meant I'd have no food for the rest of the week, so I didn't. I found where to get one, and here we are...once we, ahem! clear the decks somewhat and have time to get into it. These things are not tiny models---this one's a little under two feet long. It has cannon and everything. More of this later...Well! Work's done and galleys are ready to mail, and this set wasn't at all bad, only 20-30 pages with mistakes on them, very minor.

Date: 11/18/03......................................................103552. The wind got so bad it was whistling across the vents on the roof, and blowing a gale through all the seams in the sliding windows, a good 50 miles an hour, but that was measured at the airport. Where we are, perched on a cliff on an upper floor, I think the strongest gusts were worse than 50...and I have some experience of wind, coming from Oklahoma, where the record for ordinary wind tops 72mph. This one sufficed, let us say. It howled, it wailed, it went on for hours, and Jane, whose side of the apartment was getting the worst of the racket, suggested we quit work and go to the movies a day early. So off we went to see Master and Commander,  fingers crossed, since we'd both been waiting for this movie for half a year. And we weren't disappointed. It's one of the most faithful book-to-movie translations I've seen in a long while, a surprisingly quiet movie, well, give or take the cannon, very British in style, straightforward camera work, no slow-motions or other jarring tricks in a period piece. If you've never read the books, go see it; if you have read the books, you won't be disappointed. We were so up after the movie we violated the diet and went for Italian. Tomorrow we pay for that indiscretion.

h
Date: 11/19/03......................................................104558. Well, I was unhappily right about the wind speed---seems it reached 63 mph, and blew roofs completely off, locally, damaged others, not to mention the trees it blew down, taking out adjacent power lines---isolated evergreens are particularly vulnerable to wind after a rain. We're fine, but many people are without power tonight. Working so hard today I flat didn't surface to get to the post office, so I've no choice but to get to the post office (a fair trek tomorrow) and get those galleys mailed, no time to lose, and I'm embarrassed to have let it slip today. It's forecast to snow tonight. If we get any moisture it surely has to come down frozen. We've wrapped our potted patio rose (which moved from Oklahoma with us) in insulation round the base, and snugged it up against the windows, but it's been a sudden, violent drop from 50 degrees to way below that.

Date: 11/20/03.......................................................104850. Not so productive a day---sometimes one hits a stretch that's full of knots. Snarls. Uncooperative bits and bobs that refer to things before and after a certain scene have to be ferreted out and rethought for implications. I can usually remember every instance of a reference as within, oh, thus and such a scene where X happened....but finding exactly where that was and how it turns out to relate to yet another cross-referenced item..... Well, can you say, nest of snakes? Sometimes it's easier to wipe out a stretch of text and rewrite it cold. Which means I lose words. Progrediens regredior...I'm making progress in reverse. I did get the galleys sent off. And then the new computer parts came in, the new motherboard, memory, and CPU. We now realize our old power supply isn't enough, and so there's more delay. We've decided to use the old parts to make a new computer for one job, which may include being a firewall, and to get a new case to make a new main computer out of most of the other parts and the new board---and we've been lured by the colored lights cases. Pure vanity. We love things that glow. Especially when they change colors. But now, just when we were ready to go ahead and build that computer, we have to wait for a new power supply and case to come in. Meanwhile, at 3pm, and for no particular reason, my accounting software unaccountably believes it has acquired a  password and won't let me in until I figure out what combination of chance keystrokes made it think so. To add to my frustration, now I can't find the new upgrade for the program that would let me just reinstall the cursed thing and likely fix my problem. The box must to be here somewhere...but one thing our business necessarily supplies us is stacks of printout and drawers full of manuals. "Somewhere" can be fairly extensive, and I'm sure I put it away for safekeeping to be absolutely sure I didn't misplace it in the aforesaid drawers full of manuals. The software company wants to charge me 350.00 to tell me the fix. Of course I would get a year of questions answered along with it, but I haven't had an operational question on this program for ten years, and can probably tell them everything about it BUT how to pry that stupid password out of the gears. I'd think the rascals could give me a one-question discount. On the positive side, we're having a beautiful snowfall---everything just pristine and clean out there. We got shorted in snowfall last year. I'm very happy with this one.  PS: Jane found the missing software box...which was no longer a box, but a CD holder. A minor triumph for the evening.

Date: 11/21/03...........................105,883. Still a case of erase and write. But I'm gaining on it. I've nearly written up to the mental question I was working on in the story before the two galleys dropped at my doorstep...I've resolved and eliminated one possible branch, realized what I need to do, and straightened up the shaggy edges, the possible openings that now have to be eliminated because I don't intend to take the story in that direction. It's all been good---but you can see from the chronicle above just how much even routine distraction can do to throw you off in a book---and you can't just stop living life and coping with the emergencies, and you can't wait for perfect quiet and peace in order to make progress  on a book, because I don't live in a cabin in the woods and peace and tranquility aren't going to happen. I don't believe in writer's block---I do believe that you can be thrown so badly while you're writing that you can't find your place right off; but one of the many advantages of years of experience is knowing how to hang onto the book when the obstacles and emergencies start coming at you. Principally, you just develop a set of strategies designed to keep your focus intact and find ways you can cope with the schedule when the sky really starts falling---like not trying to work during a convention, but leaving things where there's an obvious next line when I get back. And when you're inevitably distracted longterm, there's the oldest trick,   the rolling rewrite of the front end to get you back to the right place even after a dead stop. You protect yourself from full stop as much as you can. And when you do recover your place, this close to the end of a book, you have to become very, very self-protective and try to avoid any second set of catastrophes intervening. I happen to know there are no more projects floating out there in New York that could land a galley on my desk in the next few weeks, the plane is back in its own hangar, the kitchen light doesn't work yet, and the computer parts are still waiting, but, hey, we're not going to let the computer repair get to us: we get the day's work done and then we go and attack the computer. So if the creek doesn't rise, I should be working back in the scene where I was working by next week, and maybe---maybe!---by the week after that, I may even draw a bead on the ending. And I haven't wasted my work---the necessary re-read and polish is what I'm doing on the front end, and it's getting done early. Meanwhile the weather is beautiful. We had a marvelous deep, soft snowfall last night and one of those magical deep blue skies with snow piled four inches high on mere twigs, and all the trees sifting snow. We went for a half-mile walk in snow over the boot-tops, which was a surprising lot of exertion for two people who've been sitting still for way too long. We've resolved to head back to the gym tomorrow---our pre-holidays resolve to remember the diet.

Date: 11/22/03........................108038. A cold, cold day, but productive, and a fun bit to write. Ilisidi at her best. The high for the day was about 20, reached about 5pm, and I forgot to get my space heater out of storage, so I sit here in a 58 degree room, a little cool, even for my taste. As for our resolve to get to the gym, we kitted up, we got out the door, facing a sheet of ice, we'd been cold all day, and both of us reached the same conclusion: "This is crazy." So we turned around and came back in to await a slightly less ice-coated day for our foray to the gym. Where it's located, we'd have to park on the street several blocks away and hike, and that, not the gym, is the daunting factor---that, and the practical consideration that a fall on the ice is not good for the exercise program or the upcoming holidays. Occasionally common sense prevails. Ysabel, the cat, is not in her usual spot next to me as I work---she's taken up station near the heater and refuses to budge. But it's still beautiful out, sparkling day, with snow still in the trees.

Date: 11/23/03.......................109,334. Making progress. Cleaning up a nest of snakes with a pretty clear sight of what's next. Weather says it's snow flurries all week, so if we want any Thanksgiving dinner we'd better lay it in the next couple of days. Of course since this region is rife with microclimates, anything is possible, but the forecast sounds like the next Ice Age. A major triumph today: I got the financial program reinstalled and got it to come up without the password problem, and it turned out we had a good backup from only a month back. So now all I have to do is enter a month's worth of data, which is not that much. You've sat through my laments about malfunctioning technology. But such amazing times we live in. The approach of the winter holidays reminds me that if we wanted pecan pie in this season in the long ago, we got a sack of pecans and the whole family sat around the radio for several evenings cracking pecans. You could eat a few, but if the parents caught you munching too many, you caught grief. You took particular pride at getting them out in one piece. And if you wanted a holiday turkey, you arranged for it at the store and picked it up right the day before you baked it, standing in a queue of other customers doing the same, because the ice compartment just barely held two trays of ice cubes and a small box of ice cream, and turkeys didn't come self-basting or frozen like bowling balls. And what will we do for these holidays? Likely microwave half the dinner. And I'll fire off tomorrow's stack of bills mostly by email and think I'm extremely put upon. We live in a world of wonders, and what I used to do with carbon paper and a ribbon typewriter now is all computer---I don't have to sit with a ream of paper searching back and forth for a scene I want to fix: I just hand it a keyword or two and zap! the program finds the spot...amazin', I say. I think we stress out in modern life only because we keep trying to run as fast as our machines, silly us, when we ought to take advantage of the leisure time we deserve and drop out of the info-flow long enough to smell the roses. It used to take me 3 months of hard work to do a retype when a publisher lost a manuscript. Now I could print another copy or email it and rush on to another job while it printed or sent itself. I used to use whiteout and correction tape, not to mention those carbon copies. Now I just highlight and delete without even thinking about it, let alone having to blow on the effort until it dries. My first wordprocessor was 9k of programming and I used to have to stay up all night and feed the drive its disks when it was printing an entire manuscript. Not to mention when the binful of ribbon got stuck and you didn't find it out until it had done twenty blank pages and fouled up the count. Now I don't want to know how much RAM this monster takes, but it could index my whole manuscript and simultaneously print out inside an hour.  If I want hard to find information, without even leaving my chair or closing my manuscript, I flick over to the internet and ask a search engine what's the name of the Venetian canal that intersects the Grand about halfway...instead of taking the bus downtown and spending half a day at the library looking for a street map of Venice. I push another key, my map prints out in the other room. Miracles! So....I'm resolving not to get so harried, and to take it easy. The galleys are done. It's snowing. Life is good. I'll get the data entry done tomorrow, enjoy the snow, get the bills off, and still make a thousand words by nightfall.

Date:  11/24/03.......................................111,591. Well, the bills aren't off, but I'm making progress on the data-entry. It was a clear day. Tomorrow, they say, is going to start with a snowfall. We've decided to hang tough with the diet and celebrate the holidays in good cheer and remembrance of the occasion, but not by wildly blowing two zealous months of  diet on an orgy of pumpkin pie and turkey gravy, which is a decision we both feel quite happy with. I'll miss the pie, but not that badly, we'll feel far better about the scales in the morning, and both of us will feel very much better about getting some  items accomplished that otherwise would only be postponed again, not to mention that the computer parts are due in. Work is going well: see comments under Halloween parties; and when that's happening with both of us at the same time, we just don't want to take a breather. If they're going really well---well, the computer parts can just sit.

Date: 11/25/03.......................................113,256. The data is in, but the bills wait for tomorrow. I'm moving toward the ending of the book, now, and I've got to get caught up with the accounting, but nothing gets between me and my book at this stage except when I feel I've written myself out of what I've got stored up for the day. It's curious: it's as if I get up in the morning with a certain amount of interconnections made in the brain, and when I've played those out, the batteries have to recharge, and I shouldn't go past that point in the story or I'll start making problems for myself. People ask me if I outline: yes. But an outline is only for general reference, the general train of logic that should lead the events from point A to point Z. What is more important, and what doesn't ordinarily have a part in the outline, is the minute detail of what leads the people to follow this path---people most of whom don't agree with each other---and it all has to be logical for them, given their perceptions, their mistakes, their personal intentions, and their general character. That's what has to be considered slowly, as you'd consider carefully exactly why a person you know very well did thus and so, or what they might do under certain circumstances. That's why two books with much the same plot, in grand details, can be so very different. The events are switchable---you can actually move things around in the outline with no great difficulty. Getting the characters to make changes in their intentions---that's hard: you can't arbitrarily change the order of things. Character decisions have to hit certain marks: plot events; and if that train of events, driven by their decisions, ever ceases to be logical, the whole story does. So I have to get Bren to 'talk' to me day by day and 'tell' me what he's doing, and I also have to 'talk' to the opposition and know how they're going to respond. That is, I have to assemble the attitudes, the philosophy, the abilities, the 'voice' and the abilities of a particular character in my head, and then 'think within' that assemblage. And in the situation where I left him yesterday, Bren was pretty upset, and remains upset. I'd better go see about him.

Date: 11/26/03..............................114,409. Well, it was one of those days...I got work done in the morning, and then...then we decided to make a pre-Thanksgiving mall run, just to beat the holiday crush. We got there, we did our essential errand, picking up an order, had modest ambitions to do an hour shopping...and then Jane found out she didn't have her personal credit card or her driver's license. So now we can't enjoy the shopping, and decide to head home to find out what happened---not that we'd even been out of the house for a week, except one day. Well, it wasn't at the grocery store we hit on the way home from the mall; and that had been a strong possibility. So home we go, and right off, yes, there's the card and the driver's license right where, of course, they'd been put. But then I realize I was so distracted over the general crisis I'd forgotten to get any actual food for dinner. So back I go through frozen streets, into a tight parking lot---up here, it gets dark at 4:30pm. And it's Thanksgiving eve, with all the shoppers getting in after work. I finally escaped with my purchases, and fell into a chair and didn't get much else done.
Date: 11/27/03..................................114,409. Thanksgiving. We both decided to take a rare day off from writing. We watched the parades, had a nice breakfast, and attacked the filing, the remaining data entry, and the bills, which were in a royal mess. We still haven't gotten the accounts reconciled, but we're up to date in entries, the dreaded bills-basket is empty, and we only have to do the mailing. A local medical billing department, I swear, has gone berserk---they have a new computer, which just pours out copies and mails them, and we've paid the bills, but here we are with more of them, which their live people have told us are just surplus, and not to worry about it---we checked in person weeks ago. I wonder what they're going to say about their fancy new system when they look at their paper and postage budget. At any rate, I have the monthly taxes done, the checks are all written, if not mailed, and here it is sunset. Spokane in the winter can set in for days of fog, and it has done just that---the fog developed in last night, persisted all day,, and now it looks like a pea-souper out there, in the twilight. You know the frequent notation on fantasy-world maps, The Misty Mountains? Well, that's us. By way of holiday celebration, we did the holiday calls to relatives and friends, relaxed, and we're settled in for a very lazy evening watching a video. Go out shopping to all the sales tomorrow? Not us! We had all our fun yesterday.
Date 11/28/03....................................114,409. The computer parts came. And if there was a thing in this whole build that could possibly go wrong---it did. Jane started putting things together, but the case had no instructions, the motherboard/cpu people neglected to say, "Oh, you absolutely must have the serial number of your chip for warranty purposes," until AFTER we'd assembled it to the board with heat sink. You'd think they'd have a sticker somewhere other than on the bottom of the chip. No. We had to take it all apart again.Other really necessary bits of information weren't in the package, either. The new decorative slot facings wouldn't accommodate the cd units. The new motherboard won't recognize the old drive...the old number one drive that we've suspected from the beginning is going funky, anyway. And from nine to nine, twelve solid hours, principally Jane has labored over this thing, while I looked up internet info on our chip type, the cd manual, and how to tell whether the confounded white wire is positive or negative. Try it, sometime: you can find a map of fifteenth century Venice in no time---but try to find some site to commit to the color coding scheme of wiring. With good guesswork, Jane got the computer to come up, oh, yes, and we haven't fried anything, but we're still having trouble locating the DVD drive, the Maxtor disk refused to format the hard drive---our fix for how to get the thing recognized by the new bios, which is refusing to deal with the old drive. In short, no joy. So we're going to write off that drive and get another one, and use this drive as the number 2, once we get the computer going. Both of us have a headache, we've yelled, we've expostulated, and we've cursed. But we finally packed it in and possess, by this evening, a viable computer that can't reach the files and can't find a critical drive. We didn't plan for this to be a two day operation. But by tomorrow, we're going to beat it. The case is beautiful, with lavalight color changes. We look really spiff. Tomorrow, function will match looks.
Date: 11/29/03..............................114,409. Got too smart for our own good. We don't like XP, because of the security issues, we only have a laptop version of ME, and we have our old faithful upgraded-since-95 version of 98 SE, which we prefer. So what do we do? We get attracted by the new-tech end of things and we buy a Serial ATA [SATA] 120 drive. Now we're having problems loading Windows. This SATA drive may have issues with Win 98...read: it's a very large drive, our new board should handle it, but the upgrade path dear Windows forces us to go through to install Windows 98 takes the machine on a time trip through the stone age: first you install Win 95, wherein it can't find its mouse, and I'm not sure it can realize its hard drive is that big, so it gets a little lost before we can tell it the good news of Win 98 SE...wherein its true nature would be realized. In other words, we're stymied again, thanks to our over-enthusiastic purchase of the latest hot stuff drive. We may just have to bite the bullet and go buy a complete, not-upgrade version of 98. Right now Windows is hanging in installation and we're just really annoyed. We know, however, that the hardware works. Having been at this for 12 hours, neither of us got anything else done, and we may pack it in for the day if this last trick doesn't work. The trick? Now we're going back to the paleozoic---using DOS and the floppy drive to get it to wake up and notice the ATA drive we just handed it. Who knows? It could work. Apologies to those of you who read this journal to learn the writing biz, but, alas, this is part of it---keeping the machines in good repair and our knowledge of them up to date....And, aha! I notice that Jane has the Windows installation going on the old drive: we hope to get that up, get the drivers in, and then migrate everything through that back door process over to the fancy SATA drive, after which the machine will forever after know what that drive is. Stay tuned, space rangers. We may have the problem cornered.
Date: 11/30/03.................................114,503. A day! The ultimate from-DOS fix last night worked. We got the old drive booted, the system runs---well, give or take a soundcard/mouse quarrel over resources, which we have to call the motherboard company about. All the programs we installed last week have to be reinstalled, because we had to format C: to get the old ATA drive to 'take' with the new motherboard, and we have yet to migrate things onto the SATA. First, all the data has to be reintered. Which meant, of course, we forgot a few things before reformatting, like backing up our antispam program, which now we can't prove we own, and may have to pay for again. But all that---we can live with. THEN...then, the real joy of the day, just to prove that you can get into real trouble without building your own computer. I just idly went out to the web to see about upgrading my laptop, which I didn't build, queried my dealer site whether I could run XP, just out of curiosity, and when I came down from that site, every attempt to boot my word processor ended with "Word Perfect has created a fault in wordperfect.exe. Reboot." Or words to that effect. Now, if you think about it, this is a very, very bad message. I tried backup files. Same  story. Tried to boot other files than the novel. Same story. Reinstalled. Took the processor off and reinstalled again. Removed, edited the registry as far as I dared, and reinstalled. Always with the same problem. Ms Word, thank goodness, could read the file---MS Word can read almost anything, one of its primary virtues, but never enough to get me to use it. I could also send the novel file to other computers on our network that have the WP program, and they could open it. But nothing I did would fix WP on my own computer. Finally I installed a copy of version 10 of my program (I'd been running 8, which I ever so much prefer) and it booted correctly. Version 10 is slow loading, and I don't like the look or the feel of it, but I'm sure I can tinker with it until it at least looks the same, even if it loads slowly. This took me 2 hours of the day and a whole lot of my sense of humor. I was backed up, yes, but even the backup from the cd wouldn't load, and the option to run the program from its own cd produced the same error message. Go figure. If I have time tomorrow I may call Dell and rain all over their tech support, who will undoubtedly assure me that no such interconnection of events is anything but chance. I'm suspicious. Pixie dust may have fallen upon my computer to spontaneously corrupt a file as I visited their site, but I'm still dubious it's pixies at fault. At any rate, all's well that sort of ends well---I'm stuck with the confounded version 10 on something I spend my days doing, which is annoying, to put it mildly; and we still have to call the motherboard company on the other computer and ask why their own sound card can't play nicely with our previously happy ps/2 mouse, and what can be done about it. It will probably be advice like: "Get a USB mouse"---which is nice, except we use a trackball mouse, and I'm not sure we can find one that's USB that also feels right, nor do we want the extra expense. Did I think I was going to get some writing done today? I tried. I got something like fifty words...but I don't think further progress is likely. Did I mention the kitchen light never has gotten fixed? And now we have computers spread out everywhere, with bits and pieces and manuals all over.

Date: 12/1/03.......................................115,059. Not much done. A real nuisance trying to adapt mentally to this new version of my word processor, which loads slow as molasses---and since I'm forever diving into and out of the wp, while I think things over. that is a pain. Also, Internet Explorer began to hang. This is not encouraging. I think I got that fixed. And I discovered a really nice site that enables you to find out what all those programs that run in the background do on your computer. It's answersthatwork.com, and it has some really nice features. But I have spent this entire day trying to clean junk out of my computer, trying to figure out what it's swallowed that it doesn't like. I'm also running into some disk limitations---I'd thought I had a bit more space than I have. And of course, since I work on a laptop, this is not easily changed. I'm used to this machine being able to do just about anything, and to discover I have half the space I thought I had left, well, that forces some rethinking---and bumping some things off the hard disk. And defragging. Oh, joy! But I at least recovered my mental place in the book---I just get caught by small procedural things like...for some reason the pagination thinks the last page of chapter 11 is in chapter 12, and I can't locate the code that makes it think so. It claimed it had a superior version of Reveal Codes. Ha! Not true. It won't confess. The weather outside is freezing rain, I don't want to go to the store to shop for supper, and over all, kind of a funky day. I did tell Dell off, in writing. We still haven't gotten the motherboard people on the phone...that's for tomorrow.  But nothing worse has happened! That's encouraging.

Date: 12/2/03......................................115,059. Even less done. But the defrag of the drive much improved the performance and stablized the system...one can't install and uninstall a large program three and four times without creating a horrendous lot of misplaced bits. So that was one fix for the instability. I've been so tired over this mess that sitting and watching a drive defrag is downright restful. A foggy, but warmer day, and we had both a chiropractic appointment in a neighboring town---one of the downsides of sitting and typing for hours is aches, pains, and strains. Getting straightened out means I'm not making a pretzel of my posture trying to ease the ache in a shoulder that's sat at the wrong angle much too long----pain is not a writing aid, and does nothing for deep concentration.. It was beautiful on the drive---mist drifting through the pines, a bit of snow on the roadside, Mt. Steptoe, which looks very much as if Tolkein had drawn it as part of the Shire, flying a banner of mist above the fields. Delighted to see a new couple of the Hornblower epics on the telly, which means I'm in front of the telly and not much else is happening. But we were due a breather from the computer. Tomorrow it will be up early and getting some work done before we even say the word 'computer.'

Date: 12/03/03......................................115,752. Well, that resolution didn't work. Neither did anything else. Worked all day on computer tuning, and can't say we've made much progress, either one of us, except Jane got the sound card to behave on the new machine, and the computer, loaded with ocean sounds, sounded quite convincingly as if it was drowning or flushing pipes. Meanwhile I've learned I really, really detest the new WP edition, which gives me minuscule letters or huge letters, the one of which I have trouble seeing and the other of which fills too much of the screen for comfortable working. I can get it to look like before, but I'm having trouble getting the computer to hold the settings---everytime I shut the lid, it loses its settings. I'm trying to figure out how to make them stick. It's got to be there somewhere. And I'm at a stage when I need very much not to be concentrating on the program, but on what I'm writing. I refuse to make much forward progress until this program behaves transparently...otherwise it'll mess with my concentration....PS: Got the font size to 'take' by doing what I've done half a dozen times, and this time was a charm. BUT, prior to doing that, I went into Dell's Troubleshooting utility to find out why my system is suddenly unstable, starting with that popular complaint---"Windows hangs on shutdown." If you haven't had this one, you have the luck of the Irish. Well, after running the step-by-step system boot procedure, I determined the problem didn't lie in the Start Menu---and the very next suggestion was to see if the System Close Wave File was corrupt. Now, I had heard that if there is no wave file at the end, it is a problem...and sure enough, I hadn't been hearing a closeout sound. Not unusual, since quiet is the rule around here. I work with the sound all but shut down, and normally wouldn't notice. Well, my Exit Windows Wave File was definitively missing. I chose another wave file from the list, installed it, and now not only is the computer opening and shutting correctly, the font change 'took' this time. I don't think it's magic: my theory is that the screwed-up system shutdown was not letting Windows finalize those little notes it takes as it shuts down normally. That's why the computer wasn't 'remembering' the font change when it woke up again on Resume. Now and again, fingers crossed, I win one.

Date: 12/04/03................................117,503. Can I have this day back? After everything else that's gone on, our computer has fissioned into two, one with the old motherboard, one with the new, and the attempt to install a particular freeware dvd management software on the old hardware completely screwed the number two 'old' drive, while the other computer's brand new, bleeding edge (SATA) drive flat just isn't working, though its ordinary ATA drive, the one that was supposed to have died deader than the #2 drive in the 'old' computer, has resurrected itself in a reformat and is now functioning as heart and brain of the new machine. We are, not being utter fools, backed up. We have spent the whole day running Scandisk and getting functionality back on the crippled drive. Plus we heard from the motherboard people, and they kind of think we could have a motherboard function problem, but, er, um, they aren't sure. I love it when the expert says, "Well, that's unusual," and "We'll get back to you." We've decided that maybe one of the underlying drive problems is a) a SATA and an ATA drive, b) a lot of drives in one machine, and c) a very lengthy upgrade chain on the OS, because Win98 doesn't know what SATA is, and we have to put IT in on our way to Win98SE, which does know...is that complicated enough? So to simplify the upgrade chain we're about to bite the bullet and install XP to see if it handles multiple drives any better and whether if can wake up the SATA drive, which we'd like to be our #1. And we discovered that the new board wants to link the two drives in a RAID configuration, so we've been reading articles to see if we can split this mess, not tell it that it's RAID, and get it to manage two of our four drives. Greed for more drives may be one of our problems, that and being too cheap to buy a separate controller card, but it's gotten down to principle here---or what our dear friend Abbey calls the "stupid-stubborn streak." We're both interested now simply in solving the problem and understanding what hardware/software glitch causes our trouble. In the meanwhile, however, I can say I got some meaningful progress on the book and managed to forget that it was the detested new version of WP I'm using. I got my font adjusted back the way I like it, and if I could just get the function-bar to retain its setting, life would be much better. I did get the printer back onto the network, and that's a relief---I'm used to being able to jot down a note and have it print out. We're preparing to format and do a clean install on Windows XP on the SATA drive to see if that will wake it up. It's my own suspicion that old Win98SE just isn't up on the newest peripherals, and that if we want the SATA drive and the dvd burner to work, XP may be the way. Tonight should tell the tale.
Date: 12/05/03...........................118,222. Well, it's turning out to be expensive---if we want to do XP. They want us to pay 300.00 for each machine. Highway robbery. I certainly don't object if Mr. Gates wants to lend his wife one of my books to read. I don't object that I could make a dollar more if they each bought a hardbound copy. If you build your own machines and don't get an OEM copy from some factory, this adds up to a lot of money in a hurry. So we may end up staying with Win98SE, which is more friendly anyway. And it turns out we can't split the RAID on this particular board. We are waiting to hear whether the troubleshooting person can duplicate our problem with disappearing mice and keyboards or whether it's just a bad board. Jane wants to persist with it. I'd like to see if it will float. We have a convenient creek below us. Sometimes that is the answer. We have gotten the 'old' computer resurrected, and it's working. The 'new' computer with the problem board is still not seeing its drives, or its mouse (sometimes) or its keyboard (now and again). But Bren and company are working their problems out in reasonable style, and this is that nice stage of a book where I can just sit back and record what happens. I'm very close to the ending. The book isn't going to be quite as long as it looks because I have outline material for books 2 and 3 of this arc still sitting in that file, and they will be peeled off when I finish, but it won't be very much of the file, a few thousand words. Outlines are sparse. Or at least mine are. And, stupid-stubborn streak be hanged, we think we have now learned all we can profit by in this cycle of computer renovation. We know more than we want to about the faults of XP, dvds in general, various softwares, wave files, and modern motherboards. Tomorrow, we have resolved we're going to take a few high and wide actions on the computer front, find out what we can do for what we are increasingly sure is a problematic motherboard, maybe go back to Tyan, which is a very fine motherboard company, and then get ourselves back to what we want to do, which is write, and, who knows? maybe get a few holiday decorations up. I think at least the Halloween wreath can come off the front door.
Date: 12/06/03...............................119,228. The Halloween wreath is still on the door. But it's still been a pretty good day, compared to last night. We've been having intermittent intruder problems on our housenet---and last night a novel folder disappeared off the desktop. Shall we say---we were beyond disturbed. We'd previously come to the conclusion that our intruders were benign, a case of other XP users who haven't attended to their own security, and though we doubted that conclusion for a few anguished moments last night, we found out that our missing file was due to an undocumented feature of a touchpad on XP, which mistakenly landed the folder in, but not visibly on, the XP desktop. It was not enemy action.... The scare did, however, serve as a serious wakeup call to do something about our XP security problem. As aforementioned, XP Home has very limited security options. Our one computer that has it represented a serious compromise of our house security, and we don't yet have XP Pro. So we decided to do something about security via our router...which took some futzing today, but we now have cleaned up our network and made sure we don't have ingress problems. About time, and very careless of us. We had gotten complacent, being safe on password protection, until XP Home came into the picture. Take our advice and if you have a housenet and any single computer on XP Home, take measures sooner than we did. .....Meanwhile our other computer problems are on their way to resolution: in every likelihood, lucky us, we got not one, but two bad boards, the new motherboard and the new sound card. The supplier is taking responsibility nobly and properly, no fuss, and that will get fixed. In the interim, we are likely going to put our 'old' board into the pretty 'new' machine case, and then wait for the motherboard replacement. When it arrives, we probably will put XP Pro on the 'new' machine in the theory that it may be much better at handling the numerous dvd devices we have, and in hope that it may manage to let the SATA drive boot as we had hoped. I'll tell you, at a certain point today, I was moved to investigate the new I-Mac machines, just out of raw curiosity and frustration with XP after last night...and discovered that you can indeed integrate them in a net with PC machines..... But that was early today. After the network security fix and the positive movement on the motherboard situation, we're feeling ever so much better. We may even get the computer junk cleaned up enough to set up the holiday decorations.....My shopping is mostly done. I can be pleased with that. I'm the quintessential internet shopper---most of my gift-giving has to go by mail anyway, and I like sitting in a chair and picking things out, having had my fill of lugging a stack of packages through a crowded mall. I'm almost impossible to dynamite into going shopping, and always have had that attitude. If I do go to the mall for something, most often I blaze into the mall dodging around people and blaze out again with my single deliberate purchase. Curiously enough I do enjoy holiday mall-walking after I've done all my shopping. I stroll along looking at the decorations and feeling smug, knowing the internet folk are busy wrapping and mailing all my gifts, so I can look at the pretty decorations at my leisure, and not worry about a thing....And here it is the end of November---hush! I know it's really December; but the November bills have to be done and the taxes have to be done and it's time to do the accounts again...not to mention the end-of-calendar-year accounts. Sigh. That's one thing I'd rather-go-shopping-than-do.

 Date: 12/07/03...................................119,234. This turned out to be a cleanup day. All the deceased plants from the summer are tossed, the pots are stacked on the deck. The computer is consolidated into its pretty modded case, with the lavalight front and the four-color light side...which looks great. Only we know the motherboard is still an issue. The number two, 'old' computer is herded over to a side table where the plants were---the number of deceased to living plants was really not that bad. The living ones are just differently distributed, some into my space, some into the front window.   Oh, my, oh, my!.......Jane just came in to my room to report that the 'dead' sound card has suddenly and for its own reason started to work. We have our own explanation for this phenomenon: one of her principle characters is a computer designer with a wicked sense of humor, and just now and again, things happen that we have to blame on Wesley getting into the wiring. I can hear it from here. Half of this mess began because we wanted to convert our aging record collection to CD's, and the miracle soundcard from Hoontech was supposed to make that much easier.....Well, well, well. Who knows? It sounds pretty good from in here....And, let's see: we cleared enough space for a Christmas tree, when we get it out of storage. We took the doors off the huge computer armoire so that it looks neater. I just ordered a five-drawer wicker unit to go beside it to take up the junque that used to be on the inside of those doors....We got the aloe plants repotted, one to go to a neighbor, and the rest of the annual crop taken down to the general clubhouse, where people can pick them up and have free aloe plants. The things multiply like rabbits....and we've gotten the stack of boxes of manuals and holiday items out of the front hall, which is a moral victory. The manuals are destined for shelves. The clothesdryer ate, not the usual sock, but a whole pillowcase---mine---but I managed to locate it this morning, which is a relief. If the thing has gotten an appetite for pillowcases, no telling what's next......The floor is swept, things are on shelves, well, at least in the living room. It's looking positively civilized. The Halloween cat and the spider are off the front door, and the ceramic pumpkins have gone into their box for the year. Certain bric-a-brac will disappear for a season or two, and other bric-a-brac will emerge from storage---cycling it keeps the space neater and keeps it always new: less temptation to go and buy more bric-a-brac. No matter how we admire something nowadays, we have two questions: a) will it just be as nice if we take a picture of it and put it into the screensaver? and b) where are we going to set it if we buy it? There has to be an answer for that, or it's no-buy. Add to that the 24-hour rule, which is: if you're still thinking about it after 24 hours you get to ask the above two questions, and only if it gets past that filter do we buy whatever-it-is. So, well, the sound of music cometh from the front room, Jane has had one of her computer modifications work as advertised, and the floor is no longer a repository for computer manuals.

Date: 12/08/03...........................119,234. Had a rotten night...quasi-nightmares, aches and pains which probably are due to the diet---Atkins can be cranky if you don't keep up the minerals, and I'd been careless. Greatly enjoying The Egyptians documentary on telly. Don't know why they can't do as well with the Romans, but, hey, I'm not as expert in their culture, and I may miss things...As was, I got very little sleep, wasn't feeling too swift this morning, and decided it was better to do accounting than try to write; so I hauled out the accounts and taxes, and Jane, who stepped in first to do the reconciliation, discovered duplicate check entries from the great Reinstall. Oh, joy. I fixed that by the rash expedient of voiding the spares. I hope I'm right. But I think I am.... And then we needed to go to the storeroom to get the holiday decorations. Which turned out to be an expedition, because I wanted to go to the bank and the Post Office to get some things taken care of. Got to the store room, found what we wanted on the absolute bottom of  a stack that needed a ladder, rearranged half the storeroom, loaded the boxes, got that home and up three flights of stairs, and then I set out solo to do the banking---got there, couldn't find two thirds of the deposits. Frantic phone call home. Yep, I'd left them lying on the table. Then I lost my keys. Turned the bank upside down searching for them---did I say I wasn't too swift today? Found them, fallen over my canvas purse strap, just snagged there...On the positive side, I ducked way across town and got Jane's Christmas present---no, Jane, you don't get to know what it is, and I was so pleased when you wanted to go back home after the storeroom call; I'd been trying to think how to arrange that. Got the mail done, got the groceries, lugged them up three flights of stairs and the empty decoration boxes lugged back to the car---same three flights....We began to settle down to some tree-decorating and fix a nice home supper---when what to our wondering eyes should appear but the blue screen of death on the 'old' computer. Seems it had just lost a drive---or lost significant parts of its FAT32 table, and win.ini. This is the 'new' drive on the 'old' computer, that we only got a month ago. Jane, without a word, sat down, ran Norton, which repaired the FAT table, and began to try to find the missing parts of Windows, but I'm not sanguine. It's only the information on that disk we'd like to lay hands on, if we can. It's one of our backups. THEN, just to be perverse, the motherboard on the 'new' machine spontaneously began finding its mouse and keyboard on a regular basis. This is good news, if it weren't coupled with so much else odd. Makes you nervous to be 'netted' to these two machines. And, yes, we are defended against viruses. We've checked that. Unless there's something out there that nobody knows about, we're clean. So I plan to cook a couple of steaks, compensation for the day, settle down in front of the second half of The Egyptians, and maybe have a bottle of wine and give up on computers for the evening. After all that stair climbing and shopping, we've earned it.

Date: 12/09/03............................119,618. Well, no wine---we just didn't have the will to go after it, nor the interest in drinking it....Some progress today on the writing.... And after a while we decided to try to resolve the computer mess. Worse and worse. It looks like a cascading motherboard failure on the 'old' machine. I now question whether the early warnings that drove us to the initial hard drive replacement a month ago? How time flies when you're having fun! ...wasn't the motherboard blaming the drive for its own impending demise, a prophecy of doom which only came true last night.... But that's a theory. Another is that one of the cats walked up to it while standing on the carpet and touched noses with it. Proof waits on getting the motherboard to boot, to see if it has life in it, and right now it isn't responding to its drives. Off to the store for another keyboard---the one we were using is like typing in molasses and we were ready to pitch it off the balcony---and a 3.5 floppy drive: everybody should have one in house. The workhorse old Tyan board we thought we could use couldn't handle the larger drives, and it would cost 50.00 for a controller card that might let them run, so we nixed that and decided for the same 50.00 we can get a out-of-date Tyan board that can handle the (we're sure) viable P3 chip. We're going to be searching the internet warehouses for that antique. All this particular computer needs to do is drive a sound card and transfer our old wax disks to CD. It's not much of a job, but it has to be conscious to do it, and any old chip will do, at this point....Took more boxes back to the storeroom, got others to bring back. Decided to screw the diet and go out to eat this evening---Atkins folk can make do on Italian, if we're careful. I'll pay for it, but at this moment, a little relaxation in a moderately quiet sports bar and no cooking or cleanup sounds real attractive.

Date: 12/10/03..........................119,962. Got the dates off for a while, didn't I? But now they're fixed. This started as a beautiful snowy day, the nice sort of snow that you can walk on and not slip, and it sifted snow all day long. Got a bit of progress on the book---more than it seems, since I erased about as much as I wrote, but it was good progress. We didn't touch the dead motherboard today, except to discover that that controller card may be cheaper after all. By the way, I have to thank all of you who have written with computer advice: it has been helpful, and I am taking notes, believe me. Not entirely on my own, I got the Internet Explorer 6 patch bug tamed in my computer---it turns out IE has some self-healing capability if you click on its name in the Add/Remove Software section of the Control Panel. You at least get an option to let it try, and it finally admitted it was installed....and speaking of malfunctioning installations, I spent 2 1/2 hours in the hold queue trying to get our accounting program to admit I have a right to register it: I've used and upgraded that program yearly for five years, and it picked now, approaching the end of the year, to announce that I needed to register it, that it couldn't let me register it, and that ours isn't a valid zipcode, and that it was about to deny us access to our accounts. Go figure. I finally got a very apologetic young lady to fix the glitch and we are now registered, with an appropriate number to prove it...We got the holiday packages mailed, at least most of them. And we decided. since we could, and we were out mailing packages, that we would do Italian tonight too. Tomorrow we both have to be extremely good on the diet. Bread is one thing we can't have, and I fear we weren't good....We got a few decorations up, though the tree isn't, yet, and we got the huge mailing boxes out the door so we have room for it if nothing else explodes in the computer department. Oh, dear...I've still got to make those bank deposits I forgot day before yesterday. I wonder which stack of papers they're under now....
Date: 12/11/03..................120,333. Well, didn't get to the bank, but got some relatively peaceful writing done. One of the reasons the whole place is at sixes and sevens (besides the computer chaos) is that we have decided, in the midst of holiday ornaments and other disturbances, to have a Clean Sweep moment and get some of the office clutter under control---which means we need storage. One of the units arrived today, a nice little five-drawer wicker unit that didn't cost much at all, and that had very easy assembly. The armoire doors are off, changing the whole corner from massive black object to blond wood interior shelves, with now two seagrass wicker units that are much lighter, that fit the space. The bottom return of the massive armoire is going away, and in its place we're getting a light wood lateral file from Staples that can hold many times more than the old file unit within the armoire, plus give us counter space to compensate for losing the return. And it looks airy and open, which is a moral relief. All the clutter of envelopes and staplers and miscellaneous CDs and various sizes of paper and labels have shelves or drawers. The 'new' computer is assembled and looks gorgeous, lava-lamp lights and all---besides, it's settled down and become stable for all practical purposes, maybe even those purposes for which we designed it. The other, 'old' computer is still in disassembly, pending a  test or two, but at least it's quietly  nonfunctional. We got up some lights---one of the decorations just took a gravity-induced tumble off the shelf above the telly and sent both cats into orbit---Ysabel happened to be sitting on my lap, and she levitated across the adjacent table full of delicate objects, ricocheted behind Jane's chair, off the wall, past a favorite lamp without knocking it over and was gone in one direction. Efanor took out on an opposite course which I failed to mark. I have claw marks. We're still looking for the one stray piece of the ornament, which has been patched before....Aside from that, there's stuff in the front hall we can now clear, some stuff to go to Goodwill, and we're beginning to look downright neat. I don't know what things are coming to. Web page updates are happening. The end of year accounts aren't totally confused, just mildly so, and in short, we're in pretty good shape. The outside is covered with snow, the whole day was darkly overcast, and it feels like winter out there. The one thing hardest for me to get used to, living this far north, is how early it gets dark in the winter---full dark by 4:30 in the afternoon is just very strange. I keep having to remind myself that we could still go to the store for things---the stores are still open, despite the look of late night.  Very odd.

Date: 12/12/03.................121,114. (Got my word counts fixed, above. Thanks for pointing that out. Unlike Bren, I am not particularly swift with numbers.) Snow this morning, giving way to strong wind, a few moments of clear sky, then a sailing fluffy gray mass of cloud and a bitter chill. One of those days. I got the bank deposits made. We spent the day working, alternate with sorting a massive collection of electronic bits and bobs..."What's this to?" "Dunno." "Pitch it."...And Jane, looking at the demolished massive front parts of the computer armoire, has gotten some kind of notion about using them to build another cabinet. I can't figure out how this is going to work, but our promised file cabinet did not arrive today: frustrating Jane when she's in the mood to assemble furniture has this sort of result. Another cabinet it is. I had a productive day writing, still not speeding ahead, but doing some critical thinking as I go---in this job, time spent staring into space is actually working, another of those things that leads to a high divorce rate among writers...I managed to put a kink in my back that I absolutely cannot straighten out. Can't figure how I did it, but a ladder and the storeroom may have played a part in it....I still have this ambition that we are going to have these stacks of papers and computer fragments cleared away so we can put up a tree. We still haven't found the little ornament's right hand...I'm sure it flew somewhere unusual. We found her head in a bin of ornaments. She was just pretty much all over...but she's been patched before, and the missing part has got to turn up.

Date: 12/13/03.....................121,857. Sometimes very few words are a whole lot of work---oh, you can think up all sorts of reasonable words, but not the right words, and it just takes a little staring at the screen, dusting the snow off the satellite dish, pacing the floor, and doing other jobs, to get those right words cornered and to get Mr. Cameron to attend to business. I think I finally did that. I'm satisfied with the day's output. .Now I feel as tired as if I'd hauled boxes, even if I haven't typed any more than I'm likely to type on this little entry. But I erased a few big sections, too, so I suppose there were more words than seems. The rest---I can only hope for a tranquil day tomorrow when I have more energy....It's been another lazy, snowy day: it's misted snow, snowed flakes, snowed hard, and gone back to mist again, occasionally melting, and then half-freezing, and even Ysabel won't come out of her nook by the heater. All this alternate melting and freezing makes me just a little less enthusiastic than I might be about driving down to the store, though the faithful Subaru has all-wheel drive. I don't get stuck or slip much, but I'm less sure about the other guy...Among mysteries solved, Jane managed to locate our missing filing cabinet: it didn't get shipped when they said, they now inform us, so it will arrive Monday. And since there's all this clear space in front of the desk, I took advantage of the delay in delivery to sit down in the floor and sort and file a considerable stack of miscellaneous computer-related receipts, booklets, downloads, and papers, so we will be somewhat organized even before it arrives, and I can just pop the result into our splendid new completely-accessible file drawers....Meanwhile, and on the computer news front, Jane has gotten inspired to update her webpage (gasp!) twice in one week and she has just uploaded the result. She's still battling a few glitches---she's gotten interested in my software, which is Frontpage, for ease of use, if not elegance of code, but she's still running on the old software, which, by me, is more elegant, but a bear to use and worse to update---which means if you spot a wee, ignorable typo, it takes fortitude and resolve to go after it. She's trying to figure out what's not loading and fix a few links for starters. And, the bonus, she's gotten increasingly intrigued by this concept of an online journal, and, not to be outdone, is providing pictures and animations for a counter-journal of her own---with, you can guess, her side of the computer build story. You can reach her site via the link on my entry page. Oh, dear, the telly is chirping again---more snow on the dish. Got to get the duster after it.

Date: 12/14/03......................121,857.  My brother's birthday. Well, the burst of energy didn't happen, and this is no section to go into with less than full concentration. And friends from across the state dropped by, so we went out to lunch, and there went the day. I'm watching the Dinosaur Planet special. Really nice. It's a day of intermission in what will be a week of snow---semi-blue skies and slick, squishy slush in the shade. And outside of the mad scramble to clean the place to something respectable before company dropped by, we haven't done much of anything today that I can exactly identify. First we were waiting for company and then we were trying to find a restaurant with enough parking---it's Christmas rush out there, and parking is at a premium. I, she said smugly, am quite done with all my ordering and shipping, so we visited the local computer store to pick up some supplies and fled homeward, not to shop again until after Christmas, if we can manage it. Other than that I can't figure where the day has gone. Which is probably just as well. If I'm that dim, I shouldn't be writing a critical scene.

Date: 12/15/03......................121,857. Not a thing done. Sometimes when my subconscious thinks I'm getting close to an ending, I tend to stall out for a few days, thinking, in a hindbrain way, through all the things I had to do, and making sure I've done them....There's that---and the fact that I might actually have some sort of bug. Not the flu, I think, since we had the shots, but certainly I haven't felt well since I ate lunch yesterday.... And the file cabinet came, one of those Sauder assemble-it-yourself jobs, and Jane is not happy---the thing had evidently sat in the damp of snow and rain since last Friday when it should have been delivered, this being a Monday. It didn't arrive until afternoon, and the particle board had absorbed a lot of damp, wherever they had set it when they decided it was too late to deliver it. One part of the top shows signs of warp. And we're suspicious it could have been a return, since there are three different colors of finish in the thing---this is not like Sauder, which is generally a very good company. Jane is sitting over there putting things together and seeing if it will dry out straight. I'm hoping it will work without us sending for more parts. I'm ever so anxious to get our files in order---for the first time since we moved here. That will mean we have the whole working desk straightened away, with supplies and files within reach. The bonus is, it looks civilized, to boot...Clear weather today, which will probably give way to snow tonight, patchy ice, which I've gotten the knack of walking on without snow boots---one of these days I'm going to hit the patch I can't navigate---getting entirely too cocky, likely...If we can get the filing cabinet put together, the next step is to put up the tree, so it looks as if we may make it before the holidays. I'm very anxious to get the filing straightened away and, on the computer front, Jane is going to try to get that other computer to wake up. Meanwhile I'm reaching the conclusion I should back up my faithful Dell laptop and reinstall Windows, but I'm not anxious to do that until I get this novel done, and until it's the other side of the holidays. My laptop has a section at the back of the hard disk that is a real scattered nest of unmoveable files, that just isn't helping it run well. Right now it's reliable but not as stable as I'd like---a whole lot more stable than before I started working on it, but I've only pinpointed a set of problems best cured by a reinstall, as I read it. I bought a copy of System Mechanic, which is pretty good at sorting through the registry and finding duplicates---like any of those softwares, it really helps to have a good idea what you're tinkering with before you start pushing buttons: you can lock yourself out of your own files by a bad Security decision, or do bad things to your webfiles with too early a "yes" to "Eliminate Duplicate Files." I at least know when not to agree with it. The disappointing thing is its Optimizer, which hangs, but that may be that knotty problem on my hard disk, the same one that convinces me it would be a good idea to reinstall, so I can't blame it too much. We'll see. Meanwhile, I'm going to play my new computer game---Port Royale, involving trade and piracy, just my cup of tea---and take the evening off. Oh, dear: Jane is working the new file cabinet drawers and sounding distressed---they're not working smoothly. Ah, that sounded better...maybe...

Date: 12/16/03..........................121,857. No movement. But---something worked right, namely the file cabinet drawers, which proved to work just as they should: the cabinet doesn't let the bottom drawer out until the top drawer is firmly back in place, and vice versa---much nicer than landing the whole filing cabinet on its nose with all drawers simultaneously extended. So we are happy, and the various colors of wood proved to be interior, where they don't show...Today we went to the chiropractor, and high time---my back had reached the numb stage, and now, as frequently happens when everything pops back into place, I can't stay awake. I plan to get a good night's sleep and get to work tomorrow. I think I have had a bit of a bug. The burger at one the world's truly fine burger places, that I'd been looking forward to for two weeks---we only get these when we go to the chiropractor, since they're right adjacent---this perfectly wonderful and long-anticipated burger tasted bitter and nasty. Which argues for my having had some sort of bug the last several days...and today, while I attended to the filing, and got things marvelously organized---Jane attempted to revive the 'old' computer, which waked, gasped, protested it had a checksum error and couldn't find the FAT32 table, and couldn't find its CD drive. Not good. Not good at all. So we bought a new CD burner, and Jane is valiantly re-re-reinstalling Windows after checking all jumpers and such. The problem is that this was running with the ABIT motherboard, which Jane now theorizes could simply have lost its CMOS battery---but that's another story, and it warrants a later checkout. At any rate, in current operations, Jane is trying to bring up the Tyan board, which is an excellent, though older board; and the 'old' computer consequently has some adjustment to do---read: reformat C and reinstall everything. Personally, I think Maxtor with its formatting software is a wondrous thing, but we've have it Not Work, and that rather makes me long to go over there and perform the classic Jurassic reformat, just going into DOS, typing "format C", transferring System, and seeing if it wakes up capable of absorbing Windows in a polite and sensible fashion.... I know, I know, these huge hard disks aren't the species of dinosaur that I used to deal with, and doing a DOS format would probably Not Work, either. Sort of like wanting to bash the thing with a hammer and hoping for it to work...But Jane is having some success. There is at least an intelligible screen showing over there and the 'old' computer is swallowing software, so something must have worked.... One of these days I may decide to build my own computer, me, myself, from scratch, rather than letting Jane have all the fun. But for now I think I'll content myself with reformatting C on my laptop...an operation I used to perform as often as I wanted to make major changes, back in the Jurassic of DOS, but now---the number of programs that have to be reloaded, not to mention all the serial numbers that have to be located---easier with our new filing system---is daunting....You know what software someone ought to invent? A Serial Number Safe, one that you could just tuck into your hard drive to store all those nasty huge codes and spit them up at need. I know, I know, someone would hack and abuse it, but something like a blackboxed Secure Wallet for those cursed numbers would make reinstalls a much saner operation. Hear that, Norton?...At any rate, the game is mildly amusing, and not too hard. It really helps to know a bit of history, and a larger bit of Caribbean geography, but it's a fun diversion. Here's hoping for a quiet, productive morrow. 

Date: 12/17/03...........................121, 857. Opened the file, took a look at it, assessed whether I have a shred of creativity today. Negative. So I closed the file, went off to file physical papers, stacks thereof, which was about the mental acuity I had, roughly that of a potato, I think. Lazy. Tired. Feeling better, but not quite possessing the energy it takes to write that particular scene...On the computer front, there is life, and movement, and that may even get finished. Jane had the fortitude to take a brisk open-air walk down to the store. I sat and vegetated. And filed. Which at least cleared stacks of miscellaneous paper. Progress, of a sort.

Date: 12/18/03...........................122, 405. I have a brain again. Worked this morning, refound my scene, then decided, after I had written out that head of steam, that I had better do some disk cleanup, which meant transferring files to backup. And since, in mid-operation, the computer calculated it would take 9,456,000-odd minutes to finish transferring my photo files via the house net, I decided that maybe a) I had way too many bmp and tif files, b) the computer was royally confused, and c) I'd really better terminate that file transfer before I screwed the new hard disk and irritated Jane a very great deal... So instead of transferring everything over the house net, I spent a couple of hours transferring everything to CD and then deleting files (a couple of gig worth) and optimizing, at least as far as the notebook disk will admit is possible. I still haven't looked at whatever it thought it was doing to the new hard drive. I'm not sure I want to know, but I had better go over there, take a look and make sure it didn't copy crom-many versions of the Acropolis snapshot or the Badlands to that disk. If it did---then I have to ask myself whether I should tell Jane or not, or just quietly erase the evidence... And lest you ask why any sane person takes meg-sized pictures, or worse, stuffs their hard disk with them---I was trying to get some faded age-faded slides to scan in with enough info to let me reconstitute the proper color, etc. I'm not sure that was the way to go about that restoration, but it seemed at the time that more information rather than less might be helpful to the effort. At any rate, I got distracted from the project this summer and forgot they were on the disk, buried way down in subdirectories, which answers to a certain extent why my 20 gig drive seemed a little crowded. I never thought in all reason I'd want an 80 gig drive, but lately I do, silly me. I remember an old Greek proverb, to wit, "Mega biblion, mega kakon," which is, politely translated, "Big book, big trouble," ---relating to the days in which, if you wanted some particular paragraph in a major-sized scroll, you had an unwieldy lot to wade through, and Zeus forbid you dropped the thing and then had to reroll it. This proverb applies equally well to hard drives, which  now exceed the ability of older operating systems to control. One can get just too greedy for space. And if optimizing a 20 gig drive is a time-consumer, optimizing an 80 gig drive is a bit more so, I'm sure. I keep telling myself if I restrain my image collection and other such space-hogs, I could quite well do with 20, or at max, 40. So I say at this moment, until greed takes over...Meanwhile our snow fizzled, went north of us. More will arrive this weekend, they say...My favorite baseball team just signed Ichiro Suzuki to a four year contract, which is a relief---I've been following the trades, and was prepared to go into mourning if we lost him. So if you know baseball, you know what team I favor...We got the tree up. It has lights---but that's cheating: it uses fiber-optic lights, which come with it. But we do have other decorations up. We were going to hang ornaments today, but somehow we didn't get around to it...No computer blew up all day long, that's the good news---this is counting that I didn't just do something awful to the 'new' computer with my photo backup...And as I write, Jane is over there swearing at Namo Web Editor, which seems to have scattered fossil font-changes gratuitously throughout her hypertext. Is that sentence English? Companglish, at least. Translation: she's trying to root the chaff out...by hand. This afternoon, by the way, I put in a repair request for our kitchen lights---hurrah!---and hope to be able to see what I'm cooking as early as next week.
Date:12/19/03...........................123,195. A little good progress. Then the chap arrived to fix the kitchen lights---not that I can't change a lightbulb, mind, and would have, but the apartment complex maintains the lighted kitchen ceiling and the very long bulbs, which are a pain to transport. And in this case, yes, it was the ballast in the leadoff fixture. It's so nice to see what I'm doing in there again. I celebrated by sitting down and this time Jane is fixing supper, a very nice supper, by the aroma wafting from the kitchen. We decorated the tree today, the theme of which seems, this year, to be pirates and snow fairies and reindeer...and it looks festive around here. We're creating dvd's with no problem now, and, no, I didn't blow up Jane's laboriously installed hard disk. The files were just stalled out on the house net, she informs me, and that's ok, I now have backup, and I have a much cleaner notebook disk.... The weather is sunny above patchy ice, but more is coming, so I took the chance to dive down to the grocery store, which turned out to be a zoo. We live in an older neighborhood, Victorian in many points, and I think with some of the original residents, who don't move real fast in the aisles. Then there are the occasional Downtown Types, some of which are feckless and sweet, and some of which, well, the less said the better. I love living downtown, seriously, I do---I grew up in a small town in which children rode the bus solo, and in which I made speaking acquaintance with some of our town's more unusual souls. Plus my art teacher assigned her classes to sit on the bus---no matter which bus, but they all looped---and draw mouths, or eyes, or noses, or whatever, as an exercise in observation; and this provoked people to talk. So I developed a fine appreciation for the survivors of the world---many of whom live downtown. We had our signboard-sandwich prophet of doom, a guy who used to stray out into the middle of the fair-sized street to make his points, we had various soldiers to-ing and fro-ing on a 24 hour pass, we had the usual suspects, and over all, I'm very grateful I got to know the downtown. The present town is just about right to do this in, with much the same sort of feeling. And I can muster patience. Fretting at the slow person in front of me is pointless---and it's surely someone's grandfather, so what the heck? Am I perishing for a little delay? I don't think so. The two to three months I saved not having to hand type my manuscripts (see above) are more than sufficient to let me wait. The weather's good, the air is nippy, and I'm feeling a burst of holiday cheer. Tomorrow Jane is baking holiday cookies for a very few friends who really look forward to them, and we are going to be resolute and not eat a one of them. We'll see how long that holds up. We did say we're having waffles for Christmas morning---and I bought some huckleberry syrup, just for the occasion.
Date:12/20/03........................123,195. No progress whatsover, nor any great amount accomplished, except thinking, and thinking. Which is progress, just not measurable. Jane took advantage of the newly relighted kitchen to do the holiday baking, and my resolve mostly held up---there are only two cookies I find it really hard to resist, and one of them is Russian Teacakes. Ah, me. I had one, which was pretty bad, but it was good...We're running a memory checker---thank you, who recommended it---on the 'old' computer, which has continued to report problems on boot. Once we've eliminated memory as a problem, we'll turn our eye to the main drive, the 'new' drive we bought for the 'old' computer because the 'old' drive in the 'old' computer was reporting problems---are you following this? At any rate, it keeps insisting on running Scandisk, and we're getting way tired of that behavior. So if it's not the memory, we begin to turn a suspicious eye in that direction...Enough computers, anyway...It snowed last night, promises to do it again tonight, and that's fine with me. Fitting with the season...As for the writing, I now know what happens: I just have to make sure every angle is covered. So much enthusiasm goes into writing the ending that if I should have to redo it, it would be a real downer. So I have to be sure I know exactly where I'm going before I do it.

Date:12/21/03..........................123,195. No progress. A misty, lazy day, hovering just above freezing, and I'm still thinking. Jane is doing some house cleaning---looks likely we'll have guests at Christmas...and if I can shake this headache I should join in....A minor success on the computer front: the memory and related things are rock solid, which eliminated that possibility. Then the second try at computer diagnosis, with a well-concealed little utility we downloaded from Maxtor---their site is amazingly difficult to navigate---turned up not one, but now two problematic drives. [Powermax is the name of the download, for those of you who own Maxtor drives. Caution: one test will destroy data, so be sure there's nothing needful on the drive you test.] Nothing turned up on the first four tests, but the fifth test turned up a failure inside ten seconds. The second drive didn't even take that long to report problems. So the 'old' disc on the 'old' computer was indeed a problem, and the 'new' drive we bought to replace it was also bad. That answers why that machine has misbehaved...and as usual with computers' most mysterious problems, it nests in some underlying assumption of the human beings involved---in this case, our childlike faith that the drive we bought to replace a chancy drive wouldn't be bad right out of the box. It also goes right along with my memory of prior experiences in computer-building, that the parts of the operation that most people are afraid to touch---installing the chip and hooking up the wires---is not a problem. It's the ordinary things that most people do, like simply replacing a hard drive, that blow up and cause us our problems---because the natural thing is to suspect the delicate items and the notoriously futzy sound/video items. Maxtor will send us a new drive. One item down.

Date: 12/22/03...............................123,195. I was kidnapped---hauled off before I could so much as open my file---and presented with a shopping list and a stack of packages to mail, namely the promised cookies, which must not be allowed to go crumbly, and a few last moment purchases that had to be gotten. We haven't even talked about Christmas dinner, at which there will be guests. We got to the post office, which looked like the boarding line for the Titanic---way too many. We ducked back out with the stated intention of going at a less popular hour. Off to the shopping strip---Spokane has a couple of big malls, but the old strip has better parking and more interesting shops. And I got to play smug and I've-finished, while Jane searched for her last-minute items. Which didn't mean I came out empty-handed. But we got over to the Arena and got tickets for Stars on Ice, which we greatly enjoy, and this year remembered to get a whole week before the event---and we went over to a hair salon Jane is investigating. She wants to get a new do. It looks like a place that doesn't put hair up in curlers, at least. And then we tried laying Armstrong laminate flooring over the truly nasty grease-gray kitchen carpet. We know it's clean---we've scrubbed it, steamed it, parboiled it---but it just is that nasty color, and if you cook Italian, spatter happens. I just can't think of all the stuff landing back down in those fibers, but it is very short-nap carpet, so we got the brilliant notion of getting laminate wood flooring and laying it in a work-area pad right in the heart of the cooking-and-washing zone. This is a great idea, and brightens the whole kitchen, but getting those strips all to interlock is a pain---and the manufacturer's suggestion involves glue, which we can't use on the establishment's carpet, and brute force, which we have applied, to little if no avail. We may just have to accept some tiny seam-lines. But there we are, a few days before Christmas and guests---if the weather holds---and we have everything definitively done. Jane's cleanup of the office was truly epic, and it looks fit for human occupation. We got the packages mailed at the local grocery. The place is picked up, the floors are presentable, everything shipshape and all the stacks have vanished. The main computer is functioning with encouraging stability, the work area looks organized, the papers are in files, with labels, no less, and no cheating and dumping a stray paper into a somewhat related category---everything is absolutely where it belongs. Holidays are always a hard time to get work done---I've never quite had a book at this stage right at the holidays with incoming guests before, and it's kind of a frustrating thing. I want to do both---holiday and work---and the only thing I can say is that the holidays are a marvelous excuse to do the housecleaning.

Date: 12/23/03.........................................123,743. At least a little done. Certain strategic decisions made. Jane's hair adventure turned out very nice---she's happy. She's a little behind in her webpage...been snowed under trying to get the computers we built to do the jobs they were designed for, one of which is rescuing all the precious old and outdated Christmas records from her family---which survived quite a number of children and some hard usage. The Hoontech sound card has had its hair-pulling moments, but it is capable of removing all the hiss and pop from abused records, and is turning out some good copy. Our ultimate goal is to commit all our vastly bulky VCR and record boxes to a neat stack of DVDs and CDs, which will save us quite a lot of storeroom space, and protect particularly the family items....Two days before Christmas and weather is about to set in that could make our guests' arrival iffy. But we plan as if they're coming. His Imperial Highness Efanor, our 17 pounder, has burrowed himself a spot among the presents under the tree, and suddenly discovered he could spin the fiber-optic Christmas tree in its socket. This from our otherwise well-behaved fellow, who turns out to have been quietly unwrapping the packages as he kicks them about to gain room and a comfy spot. Her Furry Grace, Ysabel, has discovered her place on a lighted shelf, which produces a comfy warmth when turned on, so Efanor's conquest of the tree doesn't tempt her... I have to do one bit of holiday shopping, at the supermarket, to stock the fridge---we're still staying pretty well to the diet, and were good through Thanksgiving and the cookie baking. Now we just plan one binge---a few cookies and a waffle breakfast---and hope it doesn't make us sick. Prolonged virtue can have that effect. But thus far we are now in good shape. 

 
Date: 12/24/03...........................................123,743. Christmas Eve. Last-moment rush, and Jane's sustained attack on the housecleaning really did wonders. She's quite talented at figuring out electrical systems, and got our glumly unlit lighted pedestals relighted, and the place cleaned up and brightened up...I did the routine things like the kitchen, but she vowed getting all the round-tuits tuit'ed was her particular holiday goal, and the common room looks positively refurbished, what with the light under things that should be lit, the boxes all conveyed to storage, and with all the arrangements and bright illumination arranged. I'm terribly impressed. I did the shopping---went out and got some steaks for Christmas dinner---and didn't realize that some of our guests may favor salad over broccoli, so Jane went out to get salad. Which proved the critical point of the day, since while she was out, I evidently didn't hear the front door bell---not an uncommon situation, since my room is clear at the back---and the postman hastily slipped us a note and took off with the package he should have left.... Which meant that we had to trek out after it. In the meanwhile we decided that Christmas eve out could start a little earlier since the post office closed at 5:00 and the restaurant of choice closed at 4:00, at opposite ends of town, of course. But we had a nice supper, most of which we brought home, since it was early---we don't have the appetites we once had, pre-diet---and off we went to the post office...  The package turned out to be from our friends in Oklahoma, which we were ever so glad to have, and everything is safely here. We hope the cookies got there... I didn't get a thing done today, except just to clean up things, and we are hoping our company can make it through the passes before the turn in weather. The computers are both still working. I spent a little time today making a list of all the programs I have on the laptop, so that I can back up those things that need backup before I do the general reinstall and reformat.... Outside of that, we're looking forward to our particular Christmas tradition, the ceremonial viewing of The Lion in Winter. We're going to postpone the waffle breakfast until our company can join us. But tomorrow is prezzies and a good bacon and egg feast. We don't know how many guests we're getting, but we'll cope. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and fortune favor you extravagantly in this season when we think of new years, new beginnings, and old friends.

Date: 12/25/03............................123,743. Christmas Day. And, no, I'm not working today. I'm cooking. Weather relented, and our company got through. Jane and I had a few prezzies this morning so I could report to my family---and then her brothers arrived, so we had Christmas Part II. I'm taking a breather before beginning dinner, which is my contribution to the day, which has been a nice one---quiet, sedate---so she writes, as the cannonfire from Pirates of the Caribbean resounds from the living room---but what are holidays for? Jane and I decided we'd spent so much on computers we'd economize for Christmas, so we bought each other things that were deeply on sale---things that we can use, once I figure out the instructions. Holiday Cheer to us all, and it's only a week left until New Year's. PS: The things we find out about in each other's journals---Jane does one of the most skillful present-sneaks in the county.  Besides the plexi, she got me a GPS attachment for my Palm Pilot, which is going to be immensely neat. Complicated, however. It took me thirty minutes to figure out how to get my Palm out of the GPS unit once I experimentally popped it in, and of all the instructions they included, one did not involve the release catches...but no damage done. I look forward to this electronic gadget immensely---being able to find fairly remote places on short schedule with far less worry. What sold me on the devices is Seattle streets...not to mention trying to find convention hotels in various strange cities. Well, and the time we ended up on a remote mountain road in Utah in the dark with no idea where our shortcut came out. The Cedar Breaks figured on one roadsign that led off onto a road seemingly more precarious than the one we were on, and we reached a major highway finally, but by then, even the cats were worried. Henceforth we will be able to know where we are when we are lost....As for holiday adventures, my gift-sneaking was amazingly tame. Saying I was going to the grocery store, I kited clear across town to the local computer store and snatched up Jane's destined present with laser-like accuracy---the present being, most appropriately, considering our last couple of months, one of those wonderful little pen-drives---the little keychain devices you plug into a USB port and that function as a recognized drive of amazing capacity. A safety backup and a fast means of getting data moved about---particularly useful, again, on trips, where things may need to get moved or safeguarded without the faithful housenet. It was also a whole lot easier to hide and transport...I brought it in amongst the groceries, and was, thanks to my speed-shopping, only a few minutes late. Sneaking in ten feet of plexiglass cabinet lid and keeping it hidden---I'm amazed.

Date: 12/26/03.............................123,743. Waked late, waffles and bacon, way off diet...and lazed about, trying to get the GPS software to load. Cranky in the extreme, but I loaded it. And the Palm wouldn't hotsync. Frustration. First time that's happened. So I fumed, went to the internet, read all the instructions, which were entirely misleading, and if I'd followed those suggestions I'd be in trouble---but it made me think of the various softwares I've put on the laptop, and how software additions frequently uncheck things that are checked and otherwise play games with settings. So I just called up the hotsync software and had a look, rechecked what I thought should be checked, and lo and behold! It hotsync'ed and transferred files, and the GPS located our position. I always knew we were a shade under 2000 feet elevation, and there we are, about 40 feet short of that. Marvelous. We live in a science fictional age. And the confounded fancy GPS still can't locate our street, but hey, you can't have everything, and it is a short street....We thought we were going to see Lord of the Rings, but we got stuck in a traffic jam, the parking lot was full, and we went on to the mall, which was even worse---so we just had an early supper and went back home to watch Kangaroo Jack, an elevating moral tale. I'm still trying to get the GPS to find meaningful directions, but first I have to decide where I want to go. So there...I really want to write, but I'm going to take days to recover from way too much food, way too much sugar on an Atkins Diet lifestyle---right now I don't think I want anything else sugary for the rest of my life...and I hope to recover both wits and physiological wellbeing over the next few days. Christmas was a success, I think. But I feel way over-indulged.

Date: 12/27/03............................123,743. More breakfast, way too much breakfast. I think it's encouraging I could only eat half of it...and used to finish that particular order. We sent our guests off before the snow hit---they had a car windshield-wiper completely fly off halfway home, but got it repaired, and they made it home safely, so all's well that ends well...We went to our respective rooms and hibernated for a while, in recuperation....Now I plan a quiet evening, recuperation, and hope for more energy tomorrow. I'm very anxious to get back to work. But the house, good news, is not a wreck. We only have to do a bit of laundry and we're left with a place in much better condition than before the holidays....We want to get back to the theater and see Master and Commander one more time before it leaves the big screen---it really deserves it. But we're hoping holiday traffic will subside a bit. Yesterday was daunting. This morning very little was stirring on the streets.

Date: 12/28/03...........................126,125. Back at work, and closing in on the ending. It will lose a few thousand words when I trim the next book's outline off the bottom of the file, but a book outline is negligible compared to the length of a novel, so no great loss there. It feels good to get back at it---writers are such wretched people when we have story bottled up and ready to go...A quiet day, a work day, a no-treats day: we're nose-to-the-grindstone now and, alas, back on the diets with a vengeance, no more waffles, no more wine with dinner. I'm cooking again: no more restaurants, either. I gained seven whole pounds in two weeks of lapse, and that's going to have to go before I even contemplate New Year's. It looks as if it's going to be cheese and water---not even bread's allowed... The weather's conducive to work: the sky's dropped an inch or so of snow on us, high of thirty, clearing this afternoon, but colder. The apartment is in pretty good order, and we're not doing anything to disorder it for the next couple of weeks. I am going to have to get to the taxes in a day or so, but I'm hoping to get the book finished first. But it's not all hard effort: we settled down this evening to watch The Fellowship of the Ring, the extended version, which pretty well did for the evening, and plan to watch the second epic tomorrow evening---since it gets dark here at 4:30 in the afternoon, it's a nice time to watch long movies.

Date: 12/29/03..........................122,915. Finished! Of course this always means a little going back and trimming up, editing the last bit written since the last time I did an editing pass, but for all practical purposes, the book is finished...And then, as afore promised, I backed everything up, and just for an adventure, formatted C and reinstalled Windows and all my programs, hoping to stabilize this computer. I started that process somewhere around 2pm, hit only one glitch when the only serial number I couldn't come up with in records was---you guessed it---the Windows serial number. Fortunately a call to Dell produced records which produced a number, and after that things have gone in with very little problem. I don't know whether it will solve all the problems, but the fact that preformatting checks couldn't find certain addresses on the hard disk indicated that I might have run my luck to the edge of the cliff, in postponing a reinstall until after finishing the novel. The essential programs are in, the machine hasn't crashed yet, I'm back on the rock-steady housenet, and I've  not only gotten to the internet, but---if you can read this---you can assume I've gotten Frontpage to find my page and update it. I'm very pleased with myself, and Jane only had to bail me out once, getting the housenet up. We watched The Two Towers this evening and if luck and the weather hold, will see The Return of the King tomorrow.

Date: 12/30/03.........................122,915. Giving it a day or so before I go back to edit, just to approach it with a certain distance. Write in heat, edit cold. The computer is behaving well, except on the internet, where it absolutely refuses to load the mlb.com site, and I'm beginning to suspect that one of the problems is Microsoft's IE version 6, which was buggy the first time I installed it, and now I wish I hadn't installed the update over my IE5 install. And just to make my life interesting, my accounting program believes we have one more tax day before the yearr end, after it just printed out the tax check. I then  printed out all the records and am going to have to go through them looking for the point at which the glitch happened. The computer problems earlier this fall, when we had to rebuild and reinstall, are the likely point at which the program lost its mind. But assuming that could be itself a mistake. I'll just have to see. Quel pain! On the positive front, did get to the movies, and greatly enjoyed Return of the King. I won't say a thing on that score, but if you haven't seen it, I recommend it without reservation.

Date: 12/31/03........................122,915. New Year's Eve, and I spent most of the days trying to iron out the accounting software...well, most of it until Jane pointed out we had these movie tickets about to expire, and she wanted to go back and see Return of the King again...so we did. And enjoyed it as much the second time. After that, we decided, since it was five-ish, that we might stand a chance of getting into our favorite restaurant, and we did, with no trouble---a case of bail out of the car at the curb, go in and grab a table in the bar while Jane parked, and we just made it before the place became packed. We went home, and Jane, the rascal, had bought a blueberry bundt cake, one of our favorite vices, and a bottle of champagne, and we watched movies until the midnight hour, watched distant fireworks from the downtown from our own warm front window, and saluted the New Year. Happy New Year to you all, and here's for 2004.

Date: 1/1/04.............................122,915. New Year's Day, and heavy snowfall. I love it. We sat around most of the day, well, I did---Jane's been much more productive than I have the last few days. I can't say we've done much except a little tidying up and a lot of watching old movies. Dinner, my cooking, was so bad I couldn't eat it. Purple cauliflower is right off the menu, as far as I'm concerned. I enjoy designer vegetables as much as the next person, but that was vile. I'm about ready to get back to work. Got to get the end-of-year accounts finished up, and then back to the pre-turn-in edit.

Date: 1/2/04............................123,838. Back to work. It's the little tiny changes that make the book make sense. Still have to do the accounts, though I'm well on the way. I carefully stacked the essential bills and papers---well, I stacked them, and then the cats played slip-and-slide among the stacks. Precisely at 9pm every evening, Efanor starts knocking off objects from shelves, and if we don't pay attention, he escalates to larger objects. 'Pay attention' means 'feed us' or else. Ysabel always parks somewhere far removed from the mayhem and waits, visions of kibbles dancing in her little slit eyes....It snowed and snowed and Jane took a shovel and unburdened the walk, and then brushed snow off her car and our several neighbors. Not entirely altruism, she says: she prefers to know where the snow is going to land. The other car is under the carport---and with half a foot of snow on the roof, I'm beginning to hope that roof is sturdier than it looks....We went to see Stars on Ice, through ice and snow of our own. It's a good show. Alexei Yagudin, Kurt Browning, Todd Eldridge...the guys, as usual, stole the show. But they had no lack of good pairs, Sikharulidze & Berezhnaya, Sale & Pelletier, Ino and Zimmerman....Go see it when it gets to your city. On television, the prevalence of close-ups doesn't let you see the sweep of movement on the ice, which is a whole new dimension. If you've never been to one of these shows, get seats about halfway up the first tier on the fifty-yard line...It was cold when we went, colder when we got back, and the snowplows and deicing trucks are losing the battle. The big blue spruce that stands taller than our third floor balcony is a beautiful sight, covered in snow.

Date: 1/03/04..........................124,665. Amazing how the days before the new year seemed to tumble by so fast, as if there was no time left, and now the new year seems full of time. Things are getting done. Work is happening. I don't feel so crushed and harried---in spite of the fact certain things, notably the accounting, still have unfinished bits. Maybe it's the snow. Half a foot. Subzero cold at night. And even the streets are staying covered. I went to the store, only a few blocks down, and considering the condition of the parking lot, accepted the sacker's offer to carry-out for me, counting that I was going to carry them far enough when I got home. So out we go, and ahead of us, this older gentleman has chosen to push a cart to his car, which, given the usual condition of the carts, the uphill route and rapid slope-off toward the service entry on that side, was quite a labor. Then someone with obscured windows decided to back out toward him, which meant he had to veer, lost control of his cart sideways down the slope...in short, we nearly had vegetables every which way. Another gentleman and I,   not my  lad with my grocerries, grabbed the veering cart and began to tow it up hill as the first gentleman pushed, and the three of us had trouble getting it up that slope...it was that deep and icy, to boot.  Jane had gone out to shovel the parking area of our own apartment complex---her chance to play in the snow---and she raised a ridge half as tall as she is, on either side of our walk. That may be there until March. Our creek, below the balcony, is completely frozen over, the first time that's happened. For the first time since we've lived here, we're leaving the heat on at night. Jane is very sore---one can't imagine why.

Date: 1./04/04......................126,199. A slow day, a good deal accomplished, work-wise. Haven't stirred out of the house, scarcely out of the chair where I work. I don't know if I'm going to turn in the current manuscript before I get the next one started, since the start of the middle book depends a great deal on the ending of the first---and no, I'm not about to give away a thing. But sometimes I don't know how I'm going to be able to start a second book: I have to try it and see where the cast and crew want to be standing when it starts, and they don't always give me good information until I actually start to work. I say that I outline my stories. But Bren and company, not unlike others of my teams, have their own notions of timing and endings and starting-points, notions which get increasingly independent as story progresses...and increasingly, as I go through a related set of books, I don't find it possible to follow the outline. Cast and crew get together at midnight and plot when I'm not listening---consciously, that is. And when I start to follow my former outline,  it turns out they have other plans. Sigh. And I have to get other inspiration and rethink---fast, or grow quite unhappy. See note on writer when plot is NOT working, above...But there is a solution. I've mentioned the bannik, I think, the Russian shower-spirit that gives you information only in the presence of lots of steam and hot water. The Russians are quite right, understand. We're sure ours moved with us from Oklahoma---a well-behaved bannik, who could not possibly be responsible for the hair-raising diversion in Nebraska, he hastens to inform us---it could only have been a mischievous polevik [field-spirit, should you wonder]---and who was only too content to resume housekeeping in the north with a couple of appreciative writers. Now in this snowy chill, I'm beginning to get small nudges from the resident bannik, and think I shall be able to start that next book very soon...she says quite hopefully. Most of all---I should be able to start it without distraction. We've recovered from holidays, have only to undo the decorations, but we ethically have until Valentine's as an absolute deadline. So we're not too worried...Jane and I both have been finishing a story. And now we're about to be at the front end of  our respective novels, just the same, which doesn't happen often....A note. When I do start the next book, I intend to folderize the account of the current book and put it as a link in this area. This journal has been an intriguing concept. I think I'll continue it through the next book: it keeps me honest about my word count and my progress. I am also finalizing the title of the current book, for all of you who have asked me what it is. I have a few possibilities in mind, and I will say what my decision is before, as seems near now, I close this volume of the journal.

Date: 1/05/04..........................126,199. Well, I might have been finished, but the replacement Maxtor drive came in, and the tax deadline approaches, and the 'old' new Maxtor drive has to be returned to Maxtor by return mail, which means Jane has to a) check the new 'new' drive, b)check the old 'new' drive against a change in motherboards just to be sure, then c) clean the old 'new' drive and pack it for return, which means d) backing up everything on it onto the 'little' drive, and preparing to do some general drive-moving, which will ultimately mean checking the 'old' drive that's currently in the 'new' computer, to be sure it's ok, but it can only be checked if we e) back it up, then f) run the diagnostic, g) save it if it's ok, or replace it if it's not. But before we do THAT, it seemed a good idea for me h) to get the credit cards reconciled for year end, since that data is on a drive that we're going to have to back up and wipe with the diagnostic and we can't use the cursed SATA drive until we get XP on that machine---are you possibly following this mess? But j) the backup from which we had restored the accounting files had lost every single reconciliation since 1999, and I spent the next three hours putting that back in, only to discover that we're missing the two paper statements from 2003 that I knew were lost and had ordered the backup copies for---at 3.00 a swat. They arrived during the preholiday computer meltdown, got moved during the clearance for company, and didn't get entered, and now the copies are missing. So k) I ordered two more, fixed what I could and now Jane is going to do the bank account reconciliations l) so that we can finally back this wretched disk up and see if it's defective. Where, I asks it, is my prior reconciliations? Ha! I suspect  a disk glitch....Jane says she's not so sure... But anyway, very little else got done, except that Jane made it through steps a)-g) and I made it most of the way steps h)-k), except for April and March. Jane is now working on l). I am going to be working m) on supper. It got down near -20 last night---we wrestled our huge red peace rose pot into the apartment, to protect it, and we hope it survives the transitions. The weather is going to be continued cold, with daily highs in the single digits, the creek is definitely frozen, there's half a foot of snow on the ground, and more coming---and since we don't have to be out in it and we did our grocery shopping before this hit, we see no need to rush out into the arctic air, except to the mail box and back. It's crisp out there! But it's a very nice day to get the necessities done, and we are making progress...at least we know what's missing.

Date: 1/06/04...................126,199. If you've read Jane's journal, you know that the day got even better...the new 'new' Maxtor drive that we were going to switch for the 'old' new Maxtor drive? It failed its initial diagnostics, so back it goes into the box to return to Maxtor for yet another replacement, and at this point, thank you, we just want a drive that works---and we want it now. It has continued cold, the high for the day being 5 degrees, counted a warming trend---and snow has started again, or rather frozen bits have come down like so much coarse sand. I've never seen snowplow ridges down the principle lanes of the town before, substantial ones, which make it appear it will be weeks before anyone can change lanes in town...But with the drive malfunction, waiting another couple of weeks for Maxtor to ship us another drive was just too frustrating, so I volunteered to go off to the computer store to get a drive, so that when Maxtor sends us the other, we can use it otherwise. So off I go. Our car being all-wheel drive, it's no great difficulty to drive the ice-corrugated roads, but the number of crazy people who view an ice hazard as their cue to go faster than ever (so they can get off the hazardous streets faster, one supposes) is truly a wonder to a southerner. I learned to drive on ice, from year one---Oklahoma has some good ice storms, and I'm what I rate as careful, but not fearful on ice. I drove generally 25 to 30, a fairly brisk rate for downtown conditions, considering it's also the speed limit on dry pavement---and I kept getting passed by people doing 40. Amazing. I know these people won't do that in high summer. And finding they can't lane-dodge because of the snow-piles seems to make them even crazier. Ah, well....But I got the drive. Myself: "Can I return this if it fails diagnostics? If it doesn't work?" The clerk: "Yes, within 14 days, but there's a 10 percent restocking fee." Myself: "You restock drives that don't work?" Them: "Well, you can exchange it, up to 14 days." Myself: "With no restocking fee?" Them: "Well, you can buy a service policy..." And so it went. Seems to me a piece of merchandise that fails on install ought to be returnable, no question. Restocking fees for a broken drive, my aunt Sally. So, well, I got the part, and got their assurance that we can bring it back if it doesn't work. This is, as you see above, about all I got done today, since by the time I stopped by to mail some items and pick up some things at the grocery, I was so chilled through that  a doubled feather comforter didn't convince my physiology that I ought not to go into hibernation. I didn't sleep well last night, and being so cold, I made up for it after getting back. That was a precious waste of a day. But the good news is, the 'new' new drive passed the diagnostics with both motherboards, and Jane now has the motherboard she wants in the 'old' computer, and a drive we know works married to it and taking data. So now she's happily installing Win98 onto that drive, and we will have some assurance that that computer will stay stable. This gives us a place to back up various files off the 'new' computer while we diagnose its drives to be sure of them. It will be a few days until I get the copies of the credit card bills that I need to finish the accounting. With luck, they will get here before too long. In the meanwhile, I hope to get some work done tomorrow...maybe even to get the book done to my satisfaction. I'm still thinking about the title.

Date: 01/07/04..............................126585. A wee bit of progress, which took half the day. Then I had to go in and wrestle the accounting. I finally, by arranging checks and assigning numbers to each, discovered that the computer is right: we still owe the government money, but we're not past the deadline to pay it. I never made mistakes when I maintained a handwritten ledger book. This high-falutin' computer with its stingy, windows-ridden screens that just won't compact material closely enough for you to really get a large-scale look at things makes it really hard to see. Or maybe I need to get my glasses checked. The other thing this program does is refuse to let me just delete erroneous paychecks---oh, no, they have to stay visible, with zeroes in them. This occasionally makes it look as if they're real. "This program won't let......" is usually a red cape in the face of the bull, so to speak---rare that I can't get a program to do something it's not supposed to, but I'm rather loath to tinker with the accounting, in the theory that there could be a legal-records reason for it. In this case I don't think so, but as in most instances when this has annoyed me, I'm rather under pressure to get the result, and have no leisure to pursue the software. The weather continues cold, but warming---it no longer frost-burns your hand to hold it against the window. It's lovely out there, pine and spruce all done up like a holiday card, frosted with white, the roads all white. I wish I had the leisure to take off to a ski resort and take lessons. But alas, as often stops me, end of year accounting and recovering the down-time from a novel is all-consuming. But I'm feeling like working again, holidays are past, and having won the round with the computer and seeming as if I may actually get the accounts in order fairly easily this year, I'm feeling quite cheerful. The hard drive works, we have two malfunctioning drives packed up for shipment to Maxtor the next time one of us gets out to the post office, and Jane has finally gotten the computer mess off her back, I hope, for a comparatively long time....well, at least until the replacement drives come in. I'm editing the last chapter now, and we will see if I get through today.

Date: 01/08/04.................................126,719. Got a bit more, before I hit a do-I? or don't I? stall point, a decision I have to make about sequence. So Jane wanted to get the two bad hard drives mailed, and we went down to the store/post office, which was a bit of a mission---we'd run out of half a dozen things we never could remember to get at the store, and this time we were determined to come back with them: score? About 90%. But we got the stuff mailed. And I decided since the deadline is approaching I had to resolve that accounting problem. So I got out some old-fashioned ledger paper and wrote down the account items that were giving me fits. That gave me the check number sequence of supposedly missing checks, and when I went to the computer,  no, they weren't there. But when I went to the check stubs, lo and behold, they were. So somehow in bringing the accounting up from the backup files, those two checks were not in the batch. Now all I have to do is put them in and see if the balances come out right in the tax calculations. Blunt force math, when all the fancy systems go awry. Jane has launched herself on the noble mission of trying to identify duplicate files in our vast collection of photo backups. When we first got the digital cameras, we tended to back up ten and more times, in the fear that somehow our pictures would evaporate when we weren't looking. We have now come over to a sure confidence that a picture is a picture, whether it resides on disk or on paper. I think a really good catalogue of backups would be a wonderful thing. And I'm really hoping manufacturers don't hand us anything beyond CDs and DVDs for a while, because the 5 1/4 to 3.5 floppy to CD to DVD transition has left us with records in all sorts of media. We finally gave up on the 5 1/4, believing we have gotten everything off that was worthwhile---but just in case---we do have a viable 5 1/4 drive somewhere in storage. Well, well, if Jane can just find the file-comparison software that fills her needs, we may have neater files.

Date: 01/09/04..................................127,551. Every day another hundred words or so. I reached the critical point of decision about how to start the next book and decided to wait for a clearer head tomorrow...granted one arrives. In the meanwhile I went in and attacked the accounts, namely the mixed up pay/tax categories. I searched. I entered checks that hadn't been entered. It only got worse. Then I got into the 'details' button and found out that no matter what I told it about the check in question, it was retaining some dates that were in this year, not the year I'm trying to work with, and occasionally, just for fun, dropping the matter into the wrong account entirely. This program can be such a headache during its setup phase, and granted the computer crashes and the reinstalls, yes, it is again the set-up phase. I have to bully it until it conforms to reality, and my profound sympathies to anyone attempting to learn this program cold. So, well, after looking into every nook and hidden cranny in which the program might have saved or preserved information about the checks, I almost got it---then I discovered I'd deleted the wrong checks. If you think getting new checks in is a mess, try getting it to restore category-checks that have been voided. Another chase through the underbrush of the program, until I discovered that, yes, there is a way back from that disaster, one of those little 'undocumented features' that you tend to find in a program when you're just about mad enough to take a hammer to the keyboard. It worked. I not only recovered from that mistake, I was able to get into the hitherto undeletable 'junk' that's cluttered up the account and just get the fossils out, instead of perpetually having to line through them on all the printouts. So, another small victory. We're watching "Strictly Ballroom" tonight, one of our old favorites. Last night it was "Indiana Jones" 1, which I haven't seen in way too long. I don't know what to do with myself now that I've got the accounting mostly ready to take to the bank and the mailbox...but I'll think of something. It's about time we got free time enough to take on the ship model Jane got. Outside, the weather's been warmer, melting an inch or so of the snow that fell, and it's supposed to be sunny tomorrow, snowy at night, and so on with rain and snow alternating all week...and I've learned one thing: this end of Washington has changeable weather, even more so than Oklahoma, so I don't bet strongly that this will hold true. I've got a stack of email weeks old that's been backed up awaiting attention. Maybe tomorrow I'll make a dent in that. I'm about to archive this journal section, as I will when I finish the book, so don't get alarmed if you come back in a couple of days and find only a button referring to this segment of the journal...just punch it and you'll have it back. It's so long, this seems the best bet. Jane tried writing hers in inverse order and got complaints, so now she puts her newest segment first, but I'm not that coordinated with the Move function---I'm just as apt to lose it. So by archiving, I'll at least make less work scrolling for you dedicated followers of this epic.

Date: 01/10/04..................................127,499. Finished! The title is Destroyer, and I have a good clear vision of how the next book starts and proceeds. So this segment of the journal will be archived, and you will see a button appear tomorrow that will take you back to this entry and others. I am officially starting on the next book today. so you will get two entries for today, this one, and the next, because of the new book. I was lucky enough to get a same-day appointment for two of us to go down and get new glasses prescriptions, and I will take off to go do that, which both of us have been needing to do for some time. The original title for the book was indeed messenger, which would be appropriate, too, but it suddenly dawned on me that the rhythm didn't fit the recent sequence of titles, and I just wasn't satisfied with it. So Destroyer it is. And Finis!

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