Word count: 9994 | Since last entry: 971
Back from Potlatch. Had a good time, saw some old friends and made some new ones, thought and talked a lot about writing. Octavia Butler’s passing put a damper on the last day of the convention, and the novel rejection was a constant nagging pain, but all in all it was still a good time. And I only missed one writing day, which was the day of the rejection (but the main reason I didn’t write that day was because I was busy with the writers’ workshop, not because I was depressed). More on Potlatch later, I hope.
The story is starting to click, I think. Three different crises are starting to come together at once and I have an opportunity to throw in some weird-ass space science detail from my researches (see snippet below). In fact, the event density in the story is so high now that I suspect I’ll have to go back and cut thousands of words from the beginning to keep it from having this sudden jump in excitement nine thousand words in. This might turn out to be a short story after all.
Since Potlatch, I’ve been very busy with the day job. I should really be asleep right now, in fact, because I have two customer presentations at 8 and 9 tomorrow morning.
I also bought some more RAM for both the iBook and the office PC. The iBook upgrade went without a hitch (and it’s now much quieter and somewhat quicker), but the office PC crashed hard and repeatedly as soon as I powered it up with the new RAM. It wouldn’t even boot from the Windows install CD. So I reinstalled the old RAM, but the windows/system32/config/system file was corrupted by the crash and it still wouldn’t boot. Fortunately, I found a web page that explained how to manually restore this file from the last system restore point, and I got the machine back up and running. I’ll ask some folks at work if this means the new RAM might be bad.
A snippet from tonight’s writing: “I called up the decompression checklist on the airlock’s little monitor. It had four hundred and eleven steps and, even under emergency conditions, took a minimum of two hours and twenty minutes. While Thad unshipped the lock’s two exercise bicycles, I connected two oxygen masks to the gas nozzle in the wall and fastened one of them over my nose and mouth. Then I handed the other mask to Thad and fitted my feet into the bike’s pedals.”
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