Gah! I’ve been so immersed in working on the novel that I managed to miss when Escape Pod published my “Only Springtime When She’s Gone” (read by Jason Adams)! Haven’t listened to it yet but really looking forward to it–when I come to a good breaking place on my editing pass (on chapter 20, making excellent progress, can’t stop, clown will eat me).

Also saw that the EP website has had an overhaul and that they’re upping their pay scale to SFWA pro rates. I love the Escape Artists podcasts, I do.

Immersed once again in editing Taijiya. There’s a certain déjà vu feeling to it. At least this editing pass is going a bit faster than the last one–as it should–but there’s still huge swathes of clean-up and twiddle-some rewriting needed. Made it to chapter 9 today (out of 43). Wonder if I can finish this edit before November 1.

In other news, I got invited to submit a story to another DAW anthology. Yay! Of course I replied “yes!” The theme is wicked intriguing but, uh, I don’t think I’m supposed to say what it is.

The editor wants my idea pitched to her by mid-November with the deadline being mid-February of next year. Hoping the short story writing gears aren’t all creaky and awry, as I’ll need to get most, if not all, of my story written by the beginning of January since I can’t count on being able to do any writing once the 2011 legislative session begins.

Gah! Where did this year go??

1.5K words, typed “The End,” and Taijiya is now at zero draft. Finally, at long last, I have written a novel! Woohoo!!

Need champagne or something. Hmm, got fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies. That’ll do. Woot!

Did not manage to make it to zero draft on Taijiya yesterday, but gods-monkeys-and-nematodes I’m close. There were more loose ends than I realized, and the denouement turned into the last chapter.

Funny thing about chapters, don’t really use them much in short works. It’s been a learning curve just sorting out where to start and end them for Taijiya. I figured they’d be where the scenes break–where I stick the little “#” in short works–and to some extent that’s true. But there’ve also been a slew of times when I’ve realized, “Oh, I should’ve started a new chapter here,” when I’m still in the same scene but I’ve had a break in pacing. To use a role-playing geek metaphor, it’s like coming to the end of an encounter but you’re still in the dungeon surrounded by baddies.

Put down 600 new words and did much cleanup of the 2.2K from Monday. Going to try to hammer out the rest of the chapter today. Never has a road to zero draft been longer.

Lost the weekend battling really annoying tech issues. My laptop got infected by some malware that, as its main obvious symptom, blocked my computer from getting to anti-virus sites and forums. It also wouldn’t let me download/install security patches and wiped out all my system checkpoints so I couldn’t do a rollback and restore. Glad I had my Droid or I would’ve been murderous-daikaiju-on-the-warpath-apoplectic. As it was, I was spitting mad.

My anti-virus program (Avast!) caught the infecting files after a full scan followed by a boot scan—which took overnight-plus-morning to run—but missed the deeper, DNS registry infection. Thought I might have to do a complete wipe and reload of my laptop (aaaghh!), so I started making a complete data and settings backup, which took huge swaths of time in and of itself, but fortunately I managed to stumble upon a forum thread that set me on the right track to hunting down and fixing the problem. Finally installed an anti-malware program from malwarebytes.org which cleaned up the registry, but I had to load it from a thumb drive from Matthew’s computer and rename the executable before I could run it because the $@!& malware blocked the site and wouldn’t let the program run otherwise. So very, very maddening.

But my laptop is now clean, backed up, and up-to-date. *snarl*

Writing Stuff

In better news, I made up for the utter loss of the weekend by putting down 2.2K words on the novel yesterday. I’m now past the scene I couldn’t write three+ weeks ago and only the denouement away from zero draft.

Holy Jeebus. I might actually hit zero draft today.

To mark the occasion, I’m going to stop referring to the WiP as The Stupid Novel and give it a proper working title: Taijiya.

Probably high time, anyway. One of my co-workers who reads my updates asked me the other day if my novel was indeed going to be titled “The Stupid Novel” and seemed disappointed when I ‘splained, “Um, no.”

I’m now back to the Scene-Which-Would-Not-Be-Written from three weeks ago on The Stupid Novel, and it has become The-New-Chapter…or rather, it will be The-New-Chapter when it’s done.

1.1K words today. And I am, once again, writing. Not rewriting. Not editing. Writing. Shiny new words.

Not exactly an occasion for confetti and streamers, but I’ll take it. Um, except I’m stopping for tonight to commit some fantastical imaginary carnage with my fantastic (but not imaginary) band of fellow adventurers.

Very annoyed with myself this morning. Somehow I managed not to copy the files I was working on from my laptop to my Droid before I went to bed, so I don’t have what I did last night on The Stupid Novel. I clearly remember doing a bluetooth file transfer and thinking, “Better make sure I get those copied over now because I might be in a hurry and forget in the morning!” But obviously I am delusional, because they’re not there.

Dammit.

I also recently reset the cloud sync program on my laptop to only sync when I explicitly tell it to because the last auto sync kicked in at an inconvenient time and confused me as to which files had already synced and which ones hadn’t. Of course, I didn’t remember to do a manual sync last night, which I realized when I launched my Droid-side sync app, thinking, “Ah, no biggie, I’ll just pull the synced files down.”

Dammit. Dammit.

And what really makes me want to stomp my feet and gnash my teeth is that I had plenty of time this morning, and I even had a little mental checklist dialogue with myself:

“Okay, hair combed, shoes on, keys in hand. Lessee, is there anything I need to pull from my laptop to put on my Droid?”

“Nope, got everything before bed last night.”

“Hurray! Off to work I go.”

Dammit. Dammit. DAMMIT!!

I sent Matthew an email to call me when he wakes up so I can walk him through doing a manual sync. I can still work on The Stupid Novel without last night’s wordage, so it’s not important enough to rouse him out of bed. But I’m really mad at myself and this morning o’stupid.

500 new words today on The Stupid Novel, and I’m one chapter away from the scene which stymied me three weeks ago. If I actually make it past that scene, I might, might consider upgrading the working title from The Stupid Novel to Taijiya, which is the original working title…from two freaking years ago. Glargh.

In other news, I started researching e-book formatting. Norilana uses Smashwords as a converter and distributor which has a helpful style guide. It’s a fairly laborious process to convert a print formatted text to e-book. Think I need to code me some macros. Yep.

Plowed through four chapters of The Stupid Novel today. Including rewrites and ruthless cutting, I netted a total of 1.3K words. I think there’s a decent chance the last hour or so of prose might be of the “See Jane nod. Nod, Jane, nod” variety, but it was chok full of plot bunnies. I’ll get some carrots and see if the bunnies are as hoppity tomorrow when I have a fresh morning brain instead of the tired bedtime one I’m currently sporting.

G’night bunnies. G’night brain. G’night Stupid Novel.

Rounding out my best Droid apps reprise are five additions to my “Most Fun” apps list:

1. Furry Creatures 11 Clocks Set – A collection of clock widgets for your home screen that are shortcuts to the stock alarm settings. Not for everyone, but all the fuzzy beast clock widgets made me go squee. I’m a girl. They’re cute.
2. iLightr Virtual Lighter – It’s a Zippo lighter you can flip open, flick to light, and blow out. The flame even responds if you tip the phone. It’ll make you the hit of any party…so long as no one needs a real light.
3. IMDB Movies and TV – Been waiting for this one. The perfect companion to the Flixster Movies app.
4. Instant Heart Rate – It measures your heart rate using your phone’s camera! You put your finger over the camera lens for ten seconds, and it displays your current heart rate. How cool is that? But do keep a soft, lint-free cloth handy to wipe the smudgy prints off your camera when you’re done.
5. MyPod Podcast Manager – I was looking for a more feature rich podcatcher/player for my Droid than Listen. This is it. MyPod is not a basic podcast app. It’s a bit complicated to set up and use, tech-intimdated be warned, but it does everything you could ever want a podcast app to do.

And some honorable mentions:

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