A busy day, and Dreamwidth

Word count: 1415 | Since last entry: 1415

Busy, busy day today. The cleaning lady, plumber, and appliance repair guy all came today (not the way we’d have planned it if we’d had the choice, but that’s when they could make it), and then this morning we discovered that overnight Kate’s car had been broken into and the radio stolen, so she had to take it to get the smashed window repaired. So I had to deal with all the service people, so I couldn’t leave the house and it was too distracting to get much of anything done at home. But everyone had left by 4:00, including the cops who came to take Kate’s report, so I could go to the coffee shop and write.

The Fireside Coffee Lodge, where Jay Lake and I and some others sometimes write on Tuesdays, recently changed owners, name, and decor. It’s no longer festooned with bears and tacky woodsy stuff… it now looks like, well, like a brand-new coffee shop, with hard little chairs and tables and no character whatsoever. I’m sure that will change as the new owners settle in, but though the old place was funky and weird and disturbing in a vaguely Deliverance kind of way, the new incarnation is just soulless. Even though the coffee’s better, and they have Voodoo Doughnuts (for the Amazing Race viewers in the audience, this is the place whose motto is “Where the magic’s in the hole!”), I think we’ll be looking for a new place to write on Tuesdays. Maybe Fat Straw, which is comfy and really convenient for me, but the coffee is apparently awful. (The bubble tea is great, but too calorific to make it a weekly habit.)

Anyway… at the end of the day (hmm, usually that’s a metaphor), the house is cleaner, the stove is working again, the loose faucet in the bathroom has been tightened, the broken window in Kate’s car has been repaired, and I have 1400 words of draft on a brand new story.

For a variety of reasons I would really like to get this draft done by Saturday, so I’m shooting for 1000 words per day rather than my usual 500. As it happens, the above progress is two days’ worth, so I’m well below that mark, but my brain is full so I’m stopping now.

Oh, one other thing: I was randomly selected to receive an invite code to Dreamwidth, so I’m set up there as davidlevine. I’ve imported all of my LiveJournal posts to my DW account, and if I’ve set everything up properly all my new posts will appear in both places as well. However, for now I intend to do almost all of my reading and commenting on LJ. That may change if a substantial fraction of my friends (and here I’m using the word “friends” in its ordinary, real-world sense) move from LJ to DW.

What is Dreamwidth, you ask? DW is basically a clone of LJ with some differences. The founders are ex-LJ employees and are trying to create an online community that is more like LJ used to be, using LJ’s code base. It’s basically almost completely identical to LJ, except that they are doing some things differently, like separating the concepts “I read your journal” and “I give you access to my protected journal posts” that are unified in the LJ term “friend.” A more significant difference is that Dreamwidth is, and intends to remain, advertising-free. Also, DW is currently in closed Beta and some things are definitely not ready for prime time, like journal styles. On balance, it’s no better and no worse than LJ.

I’ve created a Dreamwidth account and copied my content to it basically as a backup, a contingency plan in case LiveJournal either becomes unusable for some reason (goes out of business, becomes technically unstable, or makes a management decision that I can’t live with) or simply becomes substantially less popular than DW among my friends. But for now LJ is where I am and where I intend to stay.

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