Farewell to an old friend

Yesterday was a sad day for us . Our cat Mulder passed away. We'd had him for almost fifteen years and he came to us aged about eighteen months so he'd had a good and long life. We'll miss him. He was a good cat.

Thanks, Nanacy!1

Nancy's found a new contest! Check it out on her blog. For those of us who are scared silly by the whole querying process, contest are a great way to get into the pool without feeling like a complete dork.To put it another way, it's an opportunity to send your work to a literary agency without having to follow all their rules. Yes, I know that we have to follow the rules eventually, but for those of us who freeze up when faced with the idea of writing a 10 or 5 or 3 page synopsis AND a query letter, it's a chance to put our work out there with the decidedly faint hope that it will garner some attention. So dust of that manuscript, get out your pens and start working!

Ho Hum

I am a world class procrastinator. I know it. Everyone who knows me, knows it. My offspring have all inherited my procrastinating tendencies which is quite sad really. They could have ended up with one or two of my better points ( in fairness, they have) but they each took a double helping of the one thing that I would not wish on them. I've been thinking about all the ways I find to avoid doing stuff. The really weird thing is I only procrastinate over thing that I want to do. I know I'm doing it. I can hardly avoid it, can I? So for those who can't think of a good excuse not to do something try these for size

1. All time favorite -- tidy my desk. This one has legs, because not only do I waste an enormous amount of time doing it, I then can't find anything and so I get to waste even more time searching for stuff.
2. If tidying the desk fails, or if it hasn't been long enough for my accumulation to need removal, I dust. I can while away a merry hour or two flitting about with a swiffer. I really hate to dust so this is a sign of desperation. I give myself extra points for dusting my desk. The spouse is not amused when I dust. He has allergies.
3. Play computer games. The current time-sink is Jewel Quest. It's taken me six months but I'm on the final bonus round. So I have to either slow down or dig out Mahjong again.

Give me something I don't like and I whip it out in record time. I am a very odd person.

Quandry

I'm in a bit of a quandry. I love the Pluse pen. It's really cool and it does help me to write. Thing is though... when do I log my words? When I've written them in the notebook seems obvious --except that I haven't finished with them at that point and I may be traveling which can make connecting to WCB difficult.
Okay then.
When I've uploaded them to the Livescribe desktop? That makes sense -- but they still haven't made it into LSB at that time. So let's say I do it when I've uploaded the session to LSB.
Fine.
Wait. Not so fast.
I still have to read what I've uploaded and fix the rather squirrelly spelling that sometimes appear during conversion from my awful handwriting to test. And if you think it's not that big of a deal take a look at my post Better than Silly Putty.
the upshot of all this is that yesterday I edited around 2563 words which was my total output for Feb and March. for those among you who are not math oriented let me be perfectly honest. this does NOT amount to 100 words a day. Flog me. I deserve it. Any way. I'll put the numbers on WCB, but not in one huge glob as that wouldn't be right. I have to work out a better method than this though.

And talking about WCB, I'm making some nice progress on the ER. I won't have it completed for a couple of week, but it's definitely on it's way.

Happy Anniversary Word Count Buddies!

I can't believe that it's been a year since I challenged Ing to write 100 words a day, but it has. That was the start of Word Count Buddies. Cliched or not, the fact is that time certainly does fly when you are having fun.
And the best part of the anniversary for me if that new member Bob joined us this week. He would have joined a couple of weeks ago if I had kept my eye on the ball, but he's kindly forgiven me for my oversight.
I've raised a glass to all the Buddies and the incredible amount of words that we've collectively managed to move from our minds to more permanent storage. Well done to all of us, and a hearty pat on the back. I hope that the next year will prove as fertile and that we all find the agent of our dreams in the not-too-distant future.

We ARE writers, even if some of us have been published yet. We hold to the dream, and that, at the end of the day, is what distingushes us from the rest of the world.

Thank you, Mozy!

Okay. It’s been a long time since I blogged, or even cruised the blogs I love. Saying I’ve been busy is the closest I’m going to come to an excuse. Forgive me and let’s move on.
So why am I saying thank you to Mozy? Because a few weeks ago my laptop, the center of my Universe, ( sad, but true) died on me. Not just died. It popped its clogs on the Thursday before my current client’s go-live weekend. Deader than a doornail. I’m lucky enough to work with a great bunch of folks and our PC guy over-nighted me a new one, which was extremely helpful. Naturally though, it only had the bare essentials installed, and none of my documents; which is where Mozy comes in. Mozy automatically backs up all my changes every night, so all I had to do was to go their website, choose which docs I couldn’t live without for that weekend and download them.
Phew!
I’ll be totally honest here. I could have managed the go-live without the docs. It would have been ugly but I could have done it. My biggest concern was my writing. But it was all safe and sound. A Shadowed Flame (which looks at me with reproach in its eyes. I know. I still haven’t queried it as much as I should). Project Tevan. Ideas for future projects. They were all part of that initial download. I took me several days more to get all the things that I had backed up but considering that was over 20 Gigabytes worth that’s not big deal.
I’ve just reinstalled Frontpage and that’s the last of my programs so I think I’m about back to where I was on that fateful Thursday.