regeneration :: NaNoWriMo

It s raining outside. I can hear it. If I were to stand up and look to my left, I could see all the clouds and congestion on I-285 outside the window.

I m really fatigued today, but it s my own fault for being so out of shape and for staying up so late last night. I ve really become addicted to the Travel Channel, Discovery, Speed TV, and sometimes TLC lately. It seems to work out that way every night, though, because Hannah wants to be held while Michele s getting Sarah ready for bed.

Ah, the joys of parenting. (Not that I would trade our two girls for a good night s sleep!)
So, I don t know.

Maybe today will be a little calmer than the rest of the week. I could use a quiet day to catch up with some of my blogging. As of now I have a really good NASCAR year in review post and , all waiting to be wrapped in a nice little post package, but there s been so little time lately.

Ah well, tis life.
On the technology front, my friend Mark has been helping me. We may be able to fix .

It may not be in time to resurrect my NaNoWriMo novel, but at least it would be handy for blogging purposes.
As far as work goes, I have made an executive decision of sorts: And that, as they say, is that.
The laptop s dead.

I have no access to a home computer except on weekends, and I can t write a book at work it s impossible to concentrate on it, even if I did it in my spare time, and coming in early? Ha! I have to leave at 7AM to get here by 9AM.

Not gonna happen.
Michele suggested I do it on paper, but I told her it would take three times as long: once for the writing, twice for the word count, three times for the typing, which, since I only have access to a computer on the weekends, is not going to happen either.
Unless I win a laptop in some contest I forgot I signed up for, or someone decides to surprise me with a new one or a lot of money in the next week or so, I ll have to write the novel off and maybe do it next year.

Maybe.
Thanks, everyone, for your encouragement. If the aforementioned miracle happens, I ll let you know, but otherwise, my novel, which was probably going to be the best darn thing I ve ever written, has been relegated to the maybe next year category.

Oh well. As one commenter said in the last post, the sun still rose in the east this morning. I ll get over it.

I swapped shifts with someone, working 12-9 instead of 9-6. I have decided that the hours from 6PM to 9PM are longer hours than the other hours of the day. Instead of 180 minutes, they seemed like 18,000 minutes.

Ugh.
In further news, the processor fan on the laptop has died. The processor seems to be overheating and distorting the video.

It may have damaged the graphics chipset, because now when I turn the laptop on, the video is distorted. Big time. Hopefully I can get it cooled down so it ll work in the morning and I can do some writing.

I ll see if I can find another fan for it, but I have no idea what I m going to use for NaNoWriMo in the meantime. Ah well.
When it rains nah, never mind, it s not that bad.

Scuse me while I go home and go to bed. I m pleased to announce that the laptop and I have negotiated an amicable peace agreement. Its part of the deal: To work when I want it to, keeping its screen visible and functioning to its full quirky capacity.

My part of the deal: To be nice to it and not grab the hammer when it malfunctions.
Just kidding about the hammer! Actually, the white screen problem has gone away, and aside from a weird problem with the cursor jumping up a few lines at random every now and then, it s just about perfect.

And the price is right, too. Mark, whose superhuman computer powers are beyond reproach*, also loaned me a wireless NIC, an extra battery, and the floppy drive for it this morning, so with any luck, I ll be in some wireless Internet action by this weekend.
In other news, the novel is going very well.

I have encountered some first twinges of apathy ( do I have to do this? ), but am remembering the advice gleaned off of the NaNoWriMo site and the book: lower your standards a little bit, eat something that s bad for you, and continue chugging along. I find when I actually sit down and make myself write, even if it doesn t seem to be going all that well at first, that momentum develops and it s easier to continue on.

Except when you have kids. It s been difficult managing the balance between children and the book while at home, but Michele has been very helpful, telling me she s really looking forward to reading the book when it s complete. She ll help hold Hannah when I need to be typing, and I ll take a break and hold Hannah when she needs to get some things done around the house.

(Did I mention that Hannah likes to be held, most of the time?)
So, to sum up, things are going well, and I feel very happy with the progress I m making. I just need to be sure to devote as much time as I can to the project this weekend, as I m slightly behind.

(50,000 words /30 days=1666.67 words per day, and right now I m averaging 1531.3 words per day.

) But I will catch up, by the grace of God.
This afternoon I m going to play with the wireless NIC and travel over to the nearby Caribou Coffee for some caffeine and some wireless Internet access. It s the first time that I will have ever connected to a public wireless network, and thankfully the laptop comes with a strong software-based firewall, so I can keep any public nasties at bay.

All right, have a good day, and keep on writing!
* I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of Mark s super powers, but I can say that he s a great guy, that he s very generous, and he s good at what he does. Telepathic and with X-ray vision, maybe not, but he is a good friend.

Wow. That s what I call a productive lunch break.
I am really, really enjoying myself.

Novel-writing like this is amazing. It s dynamic. It flows, it lives, it breathes, it evolves, it grows.

The lead character has now changed his name. There s an additional scene that I hadn t thought of before two hours ago.
I have to say that things are going really well.

Hopefully I will be able to catch up tonight once Sarah goes to bed. Michele and I will chat for a while. We ll probably turn on Hannity and Colmes in the background, and gripe about Colmes latest liberal denunciation of the Republican party, then give kudos to Hannity s righteous defense (he is a great American, after all!

). Meanwhile, if all goes well, I ll tap out another 500-1000 words tonight. Hopefully then I will be caught up.

What a cruel twist of fate that three major things converge on the same month, November! Not necessarily in order of importance:

The final three races of The Chase for the NASCAR Nextel Cup and the Craftsman Truck Series.

The need to find a job that doesn t drive me crazy and give me more gray hair and wrinkles.

I m too young to look old!

Top that off with the need to feel better, i.e.

not feeling like death warmed over , and this should be a very full month indeed.
Incidentally, if you re wondering, the reason I am not actually working on the novel during work hours (which is when I do a majority of my blogging due to the fact that it s permitted during free time, which I have a great deal of every day) is because I can t pay attention to storyline and characters while I m juggling workload and blogging. Nonfiction is easy I do it all the time, every day on the blog.

Fiction takes work. It s fun work, but it is work, so I need quiet and privacy. The car provides both.

Now if the laptop will cooperate with me, I will hot-foot it to my car in 53 minutes and add as many words as possible to the novel.
I am actually quite pleased with the way it is turning out. Little nuances and fascinating characters are coming out of the woodwork, and the time just melts away.

As a matter of fact, I will need to set an alarm so I know when to call it a lunch I almost got back from lunch late yesterday.
Stay tuned, folks: a coworker just asked me a very poignant question that begs to be answered. It s treason, I tell you, and only on the second day!

Last night the laptop started acting up the screen started going completely white for some reason, so it was virtually unusable. Thank goodness I wasn t actually writing, or it would have been really annoying. I hope this behavior doesn t continue.

Last night I also collapsed into bed around 11PM, feeling like crap I do not recommend getting up at 4AM when you are still recovering from being sick . I took my last dose of the second round of antibiotics two nights ago, and feel worse today. Granted, I did eat a few sugar cookies yesterday, but so what?

They looked good, and it s OK to splurge every once in a while, right? Well, no, because refined sugar can exact a most devastating toll on one s immune system, and when my immune system was already struggling, I was just asking for it.
No more cookies.

Having an active immune system, especially in the midst of flu season, is a really, really good thing.
I got up this morning and felt worse. Sore throat, the cough is back (and worse than before), and I just generally feel poorly today.

Oh, the novel? I was getting to that. Well, no, I actually wasn t.

Or I didn t, this morning. 4AM came and went. I didn t even bother setting my alarm for then, because I knew it just was not going to happen.

5AM: yeah, right. 6AM: do I have to get up? Unnngggghhhh .

I might go home sick in a little while. Bleh.
The novel is going to be sheer genius at least in this genius eyes, humbly speaking when I get to it.

Right now, getting better seems like a darn good plan. I will catch up. I will.

I believe the appropriate expression is oy . 4AM came a little too early this morning, so I slept in until 4:25 before stumbling downstairs and finishing off the pound of that I had opened last Friday using my press pot. It turned out well this morning, and thanks to some good advice I got this morning from , it may be even better soon.

Coffee in hand, caffeine in the imbibition process, fire up the ol laptop and it s off to the races. I still have no title for it yet, but that s OK. At least I m out of the gate.

Things are actually proceeding quite well. Little details that I hadn t thought of are coming to mind, and I have been pleasantly surprised to discover that my command of the English language, as well as my mental storehouse of synonyms, has dramatically increased since I set the metaphorical pen on the desk 14 years ago. That s nice to know.

If you d like to view my progress, click for my profile. (May require login.)
This afternoon I m going to go price a wireless router and PCMCIA wireless NIC.

I ultimately plan to hook those up so that I can get some Internet access at home while downstairs in the living room. I love having the laptop, because I can sit downstairs with my family instead of being chained to the desk upstairs. Sarah, my four-year-old daughter, seems fairly understanding of my writing she finds anything I do on the computer fascinating, actually!

so this setup should work well if I need to watch her this weekend while she s occupied with Curious George, The Wiggles, or Little Einsteins.
All right, so how are my novel-writing friends doing? I know has bested my word count almost by twice, so far (which is good for her, but I like to have some sleep!

).
Cheers.
Disclaimer: I don t know diddly-squat about zen or all that.

I just thought that sounded like a catchy title.
OK, so the isn t perfect. Mark said it wasn t, and he s right.

It does some downright quirky things sometimes, like the trick disappearing CD-ROM drive. If it were a magic trick, it would be pretty cool, but it s not. It s just weird like that.

You have to reseat the thing, shut down all applications that might need to access it, then redetect it in Device Manager (it s considered a USB device), and voilá! The drive returns!
I ve had to do this many times since last week, but you know what?

Free is good, and it s just a loaner anyway. I can live with it, and I don t need the CD drive that often. It s kind of fun to tweak around with it in my spare time (what spare time?

), anyway. I ll see if I can fix it permanently later.
Anyway, last night I asked my dad if I could borrow an AC/DC inverter so I can run the laptop off of the cigarette lighter in my car.

He had an extra one that he didn t need for the month, so that a was blessing. This morning I plugged it in, turned it on, and
nothing. The light didn t come on on the inverter, and it was not providing any juice to the laptop.

Hmmm.
At first, I thought blown fuse, happens sometimes , but when I checked the fuses, they were all fine. Then I fiddled around with the lighter connection behind the dash, which was easy to do because I don t have a radio installed in the truck right now.

Playing with the connection for a few minutes, I discovered that one of the two leads connected to the back of the lighter assembly was not making good contact. I bent the lead a little bit to fix the contact, plugged that assembly back in, plugged the inverter into the socket, and we were golden. AC power to the laptop.

Now I don t have to worry about the machine hibernating because of a low battery during a really creative moment.
The things us NaNoWriMo participants do. Now I have a nice comfortable and private place to write inside my truck during my lunch breaks.

I even figured out the best ergonomic angle to balance the laptop on the steering wheel. So I m equipped. Less than 8 hours to go (EST) until NaNoWriMo begins.

I hope my fellow writers are ready, because now I am. I can t wait!
Thanks again, Mark.

I ll give you a cut of the royalties once I m a bestselling author and rolling in the dough.

12/22/2006 - 1/20/2007
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