author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

So. Laptops. Today my entire brain is taken up with laptops. Well, and writing a little bit, but mostly laptops: the care and feeding thereof, the backing up of their contents, the getting of technical support when things go wrong.

Mostly it's the tech support angle, with a side-order of backing up.

I have this love-hate relationship with Dell. I'm on my second Dell Inspiron, and I keep swearing it'll be my last because both of them had problems. My previous one, a 1505e, had hinges that constantly loosened and a CD/DVD-ROM tray that repeatedly broke. My current Inspiron, a 1564, had serious instability right from the time I got it in April of 2010. This was frustrating because, darn it, the laptop was new. I was not ready to deal.

So I disabled the internal USB hub that ran the webcam that seemed intimately related to the Blue Screen of Death memory dump crashes that happened sometimes when I adjusted the angle of the monitor (but if the webcam was running, it happened every time), and that managed things until about October of last year. And even then, when simply moving the silly thing risked a shut down (now in three different flavors! Red Raspberry Restart! Blue Raspberry Restart! And Black-Out Licorice!), I put it off. And I kept putting it off even though sometimes it shut down without my moving it at all.

There was NaNoWriMo to deal with, after all. And then in December there were all those things I had let pile up during NaNoWriMo. I'm a writer. I live on my laptop. Even when I'm not writing, I'm attached to the machine. The thought of backing up all the crap and living without my computer for a couple of weeks was a painful one. And I didn't even want to think about having to recreate all my settings from scratch if an OS reinstall.

In the first week of January, the dang thing crashed during startup. Not the first time it had done this, but then it crashed again. And then it didn't want to start up for several tries. SCARY. It was time to take this problem seriously.

But, see, here's the "love" part of the love-hate relationship. Besides being powerful little machines that will do pretty much anything I'd ask of a desktop computer while being perfectly portable, they come from a company who make tech support practically painless. I tend to forget the practically painless part when I'm dreading making the call, but it's true. If you are in the market for a Dell, and you're trying to decide whether to buy the warranty extension, buy that sucker. I mean, if you can afford it. It does add a couple hundred to the price tag. But oh, the headaches it will save you. Also the money. I got the 3-year extension. A laptop is an investment, and I want it to last.

So. I explained the various permutations of my Inspiron's instability to a tech support specialist over live chat. "Overheats far too easily," I said. "Shuts down quasi-randomly." And so forth. And the tech support specialist did what they'd done twice for my previous Inspiron: they had a FedEx box shipped to my door so I could ship the ailing machine to their repair depot, all free of charge.

Thankfully, around the same time I got the 1564, John got a Dell Inspiron 1440, and he never uses it because he's always using his work computer instead. (Watching how well that thing runs is an effective advertisement for Asus. I have laptop envy.) So I set up a profile, made myself comfortable on it, and ported everything over.

The box arrived two days later. The following day I shipped it back, Intel Inside. Included with the machine was a meticulously filled-out form describing all the permutations of my problem and how to reasonably expect to replicate it. This is an important plot point.

Several days later I received an email that said FedEx had delivered it. The next day, that it had arrived in the repair depot and work would begin.

The day after that, that it had been shipped back to me.

"Hmm," I said, "that was suspiciously quick."

Two days later, the box arrived. I opened it up. I eyeballed the memo stating that the only corrective action taken was to reinstall Windows. I said "Hmm" again and turned the machine on.

I picked it up while it was booting. Blip! Out go the lights.

Given the ease with which I caused all three flavors of computer crash within about five minutes, I can only assume the folks at the repair depot didn't actually read those meticulous error-replication instructions. Maybe my handwriting is worse than I thought? Maybe they saw that I checked "random" and didn't notice that I'd also checked "replicable."

So this was obnoxious and caused me to consider changing my opinion of Dell Technical Support for the first time in about five years. But I called the phone number listed in case "for any reason the portable does not operate to your satisfaction upon receipt," and despite that it was midnight Mountain Time, a cheerful receptionist took down my data and pulled up my file. (My opinion started going back up again.)

After I told her my frustrations and ran some diagnostics to her specifications, she talked to a manager and told me that, seeing as how the reinstallation of Windows didn't help, it must be a hardware issue. ("I know!" I did not say. "That's what I've been saying all along!" I further bit my tongue on.) Therefore they would have an on-site technician replace my motherboard, hard drive, heat sink, and fan.

"Oh, that's fantastic! Wait -- 'on-site' -- you can't seriously mean at my site, can you?"

"Yes, ma'am. A technician will come to you."

Should I be as impressed as I am about this? I was, and still am, seriously impressed. That was late Friday night when we spoke, and today a technician did indeed visit and replace the specified hardware. I got to watch him take the thing to pieces, and I got to make a go at cleaning out the keyboard while it was detached, and I got to ask him questions about the process, and and and basically I got to feel more or leass involved in at least the head-space of whatever was happening to my computer.

Not to mention all the exchanging of pet stories (apropos of my cats hanging around) and Rush concert stories (apropos of my Snakes and Arrows tee), because I'm a proud member of various geek tribes and I love having fellow tribe members come visit.

Unfortunately, he was on a tight schedule and couldn't stick around for the First Time Running Windows Setup rigmarole. But he did stay long enough to watch me picked up the laptop and swing it upside down and mess with its lid and tap on the hinges ...and utterly fail to cause a shut-down. From this he determined the hard drive didn't need replacing after all, so he packed up his box of electronics and headed out. "You probably had a miniscule crack in the motherboard right from the factory," he said, "which just got worse every time it heated up and cooled down."

I thanked him profusely, waved goodbye, and set about setting up Windows.

About an hour later, I discovered my external speakers weren't functioning.

*facepalm*

This whole saga has been like a game of Good News Bad News. "Good news! Your warranty is good until April 2013! Bad news! You have to invoke it! Good news! A tech will come to your actual house and replace hardware at your kitchen table! Bad news! Now your speakers don't work! Good news! An on-site tech will be with you in a couple of days to replace your speakers or maybe just re-attach your current speaker's cables, because, awesome as today's tech was, he may have forgot to do this, probably because you wouldn't stop talking the whole time he was working, you nerd! How easy is that?!"

All in all, the balance is on the good news side. Live with computers and, sooner or later, you'll need computer repair. Maybe you'll need it on day 366; maybe you'll need it on day 1. At least the warranty is comprehensive and the people backing it are going the extra mile. And, being the fallible humans that they are, maybe Dell Technical Support won't fix everything on the first try -- but they'll fix it on the next try, or the one after that. Whatever it takes.

It's exhausting to finally come around to making the complaint, but I can't honestly complain -- or at least I can't lastingly complain -- about their complaint department.

So I didn't actually announce that "Blackbird" didn't actually sell, right? "Blackbird" got the most adorable form rejection letter ever. Of course, invite-only anthologies mean that "form rejection" takes on a different meaning. It's not like an ongoing quarterly magazine with its dreaded "Did not meet our needs at this time." In this case, a limited amount of people were getting it, all at once, and it was written specifically for this instance, and it was hand-pasted into the body of individual replies to individual submission emails. So. That said, the copy that got pasted was adorable. It also made me grin and look forward to submitting to this editor's next anthology.

Today, I failed to get any new work done on the fiction queue, but I did manage to update my manuscript submissions database. This meant grabbing dates from various emails, and also doing more than a few direct database inserts and lookups via PHPMyAdmin because I never got around to building certain of the key web forms that would make it simple. Yeah, I write my own PHP/MySQL widgets (this blog, for instance -- there's a reason it doesn't look like Wordpress or Typepad). They aren't very well-written widgets. I bought an O'Reilly book that's supposed to help me write better widgets, but first I have to read the book. Meanwhile, I can add a new market or a new manuscript from my Super Sekret Website (Memberz Only), but if I want to juxtapose them interestingly, I have to clamber backstage and futz with the tables directly. For now. Until I get off my butt and fix things.

So. The Feb 15 email submission of "Blackbird" got logged along with the Mar 11 rejection letter in the Correspondence Log table, right after I added the entry for the anthology in the Markets table and the entry for the submission itself (defined as "intersection of this manuscript and that market) in the Submissions table. My table relations, let me show you them! Then I had to go back and add the rejection letter for "Lambing Season" from another anthology last year. Then I clicked "Show stuff in slush," knowing full well I had nothing in slush; when something came up, I had to locate and correct the orphaned Correspondence Log entry.

All of which left me with, like I said, absolutely zero in the slush. We had to fix that.

"Blackbird" has been kicked off the couch with instructions to "get off your lazy bum and get a job or something, I dunno, you can buy your own damn canned herring, these are mine. Especially the herring in cabernet sauce, you try taking those and you pull back a stump, my lad." So the story took the hint and slushed its happy ass out the door.

And then I logged the submission, both here and over at Duotrope, because for once I was submitting not to an anthology but to a magazine, so I could actually pull the market's name out of Duotrope's search engine.

Tomorrow I may be very ambitious and show a couple more manuscripts the slush treatment. Also, I may actually get some work done toward something else being submittable.

Only, I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but, what's up with 70% of all surveyed pro markets, and some semi-pro too, being closed until May? I mean, I knew the industry was smaller than it looked, but damn. Them's some serious cahoots there, y'all.

So Friday I produced a new finished draft, mostly at the Moonlight Diner again. Friday night I emailed it to a good friend who's also working on a story for submission to the same anthology. Got some great comments back from him over the weekend, which I mostly fed to the composting brain to work on while I took the weekend off. The biggest thing is that Scene X isn't quite yet there. I figured. It's close, but it's (in my opinion) too much with the clue-by-four to the head between the characters' role-reversal and the backstory exposition, and (in my friend's wise opinion) structurally awkward because of all the "you"s you get when you combine 2nd person narration with dialogue. So I've been idly thinking about that, this weekend.

I also reciprocated with the story critique, which required me to finally learn how to use Google Docs. Google Docs is spooky. It'll tell you if someone you've shared a document is viewing it at the same time you are. It'll let you watch them edit it. This little pink cursor shows up right where the other person has it, so you can tell exactly which of your line-by-line comments they're looking at. And that's where I get all self-conscious and close the browser window. (My friend points out that this means we could have real-time chat in the margins of a manuscript. I admit this sounds useful.)

Tonight I'm working on a final revision. It's not going to be done while tonight is still tonight. My aim is to submit this thing tomorrow morning, which just happens to be deadline day for the anthology. (My friend is on roughly the same timeline.) I know what I'm going to do for Scene X--it's going to have the same goal-role-reversal, but will hopefully be a bit more subtle and a lot shorter. It'll have a lot less exposition because, really, we don't need to know as much backstory as I have personally figured out, does it? And I caught a bunch of typos, repeating words, and other infelicities to fix.

And I realized all over again that serious work on finishable fiction is one of the few things guaranteed to leave me feeling good at the end of a day. So. More of that, yes? Yes. And maybe not just on weekdays.

Finished a draft yesterday. Still don't know quite what this story is, other than bloated; don't really know what its title wants to be, other than "not that." To fix the one, I'm doing a "quick" (ha!) revision pass this afternoon before emailing it to, or reading it to, friends and colleagues. To fix the latter, I plan on throwing this piece on the mercy of said friends and colleagues.

In case anyone's interested, Open Office Writer will open WordPerfect 5.1 documents remarkably well. However, the conversion is not without its flaws. All table structures in my WP51 document get visible borders that then have to be removed...

1. Right-click inside table
2. Select "Table..."
3. Under "Borders" tab, in the Line/Style section, choose "None"

...and all tabs need to be reinserted, which is most easily done using RegEx Find & Replace. Which isn't simple. Open Office Writer's implementation of Regular Expressions is... non-standard. The expression "\n" means "paragraph mark" in the Replace With field, but "newline" in the Search Field. Or something. So apparently the thing to do is search for the first character of each line and prepend a tab:

Search For: ^(.)
Replace With: \t$1

And you should definitely not click "Replace All." This ends in tears. Have patience and perform the replacement one at a time; when it finds a new line that should not begin with a tab, press the "Find" button to skip this instance and move on to the next.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with a novel-length document. Probably refrain from using WP51 for my draft revisions, I guess. Just export RTF from yWriter and open the RTF with Open Office. Which is fine for novels written in yWriter; not so fine for novels written in WP51.

This is one of those "bridges" you only "cross" upon arrival, so I hear.

I did indeed reach 50K.

Now, NaNoWriMo.org does not believe me, and indicates that I have used roughly 300 em-dashes in my manuscript thus far which have fooled its word count validator into believing two words to be one. But this does not worry me. I have one day left, that day having 2 write-ins in it, and I have two or perhaps three scenes yet to write before I can consider this draft ended. I expect it'll be another 1500 words or so. That should take care of the NaNoWriMo.org/yWriter discrepancy.

Yesterday's plot hole? I meant to fix it going forward. Not go back and edit; just, whenever referring back to the previously written scenes, pretend like they had gotten the appropriate amounts of Plot Plaster smeared on. Then what did I do? I took the plot hole and ran with it. I suppose the Muse did not approve of the quality of the Plot Plaster I had on hand, and sent me shopping for a superior brand. It's not evident from this excerpt. You'll just have to take my word for it that not only are the men Jet raised from the dead still walking around, but apparently she also can cause other profound changes that make the next conflict after this one seem increasingly artificial.

I think I'm onto something though. I'm hoping it'll solidify in my head while I sleep tonight.

You're disarranged. Deranged. You're mad. You think you can swallow a pill in the dream and wake up as a Commander of Adjustments? It's not I who am in danger of mistaking dreams for reality; it's you. My thoughts only make him chuckle. In humans, laughter is an effect of interrupted breath. In Chender it comes of his being, the thoughts that are his body; they are skipping like one of Lia's scratched CDs. What I am hearing is the sound of Chender making love with his own obsessions. The realization horrifies me. It's not possible. And even if it were, it would not be allowed. Regardless, I swear you will not be allowed the attempt.

But my words are mere helpless babble for all the effect they have on Chender, who continues chuckling at me. The skipping, looping, hiccuping thought shifts to new words: who could who could poss possibly possibly stop me?

Without thought, without a plan, I attack him. It is not so much in answer to his question as to make his insane giggling stop. I have the notion that, were I to listen to his madness long enough, I would be sucked into it, wrapped up and bound up and wound into this weird psychosis. So I attack.

This is all really geeky and possibly esoteric. It's very, very cool, however.

I keep a couple of blogs going over at Examiner.com. One of them is National Puzzle Pirates Examiner, where I post mini-game tutorials, announcements of monthly limited edition ships and trophies, and blockade schedules.

The latter, blockade schedules, takes up a bit more of my time than I think it's probably worth. Except, I think it's worth it just to create a web resource that didn't already exist. You can get a flag's info, a crew's info, a player's info, and even the various top rankings of these entities as regards their puzzle standings and fame, all by going to the yoweb pages--but you can't get an up-to-date schedule of upcoming blockades (huge multi-player sea battles determining the control of an island) on the web. You have to log in to get this info.

So I create this resource as best I can, by logging in myself. To each of the nine servers. Every day.

It goes like this. The weekend schedule goes up on Sunday night or Monday morning, and the weekday schedule goes up on Friday night or Saturday morning. Creating the post involves logging in to each of the nine servers, or "Oceans," and copying down what I see on the Blockades tab of the Notice Board into an spreadsheet. Then I sort the spreadsheet, separate out the blockades that start during the block of time the current post covers, and type up a list. Sometimes I come up with something witty to write in the intro para and sometimes I don't.

Then, each day throughout the week, I log onto each of the nine servers again to see if additional blockades got scheduled for the current post's time period. If so, I add them into the current post.

Every single time I write up one of these posts, I find myself thinking, "I need to create a proper database infrastructure, and then a web page that spits out the blockade list so I can just copy and paste it into Examiner's edit page. One of these days..."

This morning, I started creating that database infrastructure. Relearning PHP/MySQL. Navigating timezone offsets and PHP's DateTime object. Scraping the rust off my memory of basic Javascript event handlers, PHP looping syntax, and MySQL INSERT statements. I had a great time kvetching about the DateTime object over lunch with John today. Who couldn't help me much, being more of a Java guy than a PHP guy, but he did help me take a second look at my logic.

("You'd think if you gave it a date/time string AND a time zone, it would create a DateTime object set to that time in that time zone. Wouldn't you? But noooooo, it creates a DateTime object set to that time in the web server's time zone, then it converts the timestamp to the time zone you specify! This is Not Useful to me!" "So why don't you do the conversions client side?" "Because Javascript can't answer the question 'What timezone offset holds in Pacific Time?' It only knows that my computer is 420 minutes short of UTC." "Date objects are universally hinky, aren't they?")

Guess what I didn't do today? Pretty much anything else! Thank goodness for the write-in at Barbed Wire Books today, or I'd have failed to write the next 1800 words of the novel too.

As it turned out, Lia didn't get to keep the car. Which is to say, it wasn't hers. It was both of theirs, because they had to start living in it.

That was Jet's suggestion, but Lia would have brought it up if Jet hadn't. That night, she'd let Jet precede her up the stairs to her apartment, just in case one of the Swifts' thugs was waiting. They weren't. There was no trouble. But Lia couldn't bring herself to lie down on the bed. Standing there in her living room, the sense of insecurity was so great that Lia had trouble believing in the walls. She actually walked through the front room to lay a hand on the window, just to make sure it was solid.

Before Jet said word one, Lia announced, "We can't stay here."

"You're right. Pack what you need, and we'll go."

Lia blinked. She'd expected some sort of argument over this--but only because Jet always argued with her, not because she thought Jet would disagree with her reasoning. She got over her surprise quickly.

Walking into the bedroom, she half-expected someone to shoot her from the fire escape. No one did. No one was there at all.

They traveled north, on Lia's suggestion, though driving through Mapleton Ridge made her cringe even at 65 miles per hour on the highway. She shrank down beneath the level of the passenger window, hoping no one would see her. Hoping no one would recognize Jet, who was plainly visible. They made it through the city unscathed, then crossed another hundred miles of desert on their way to the town of Painted Sands.

Lia's home town. The town where her parents lived, and her brother, and all the years between them. Years suffered don't leave their place of origin. They stay and wait for you to return.

Jet glanced at her as they entered the city limits, then gave her a second look. "You all right?"

Lia shook her head and burrowed even further down in her seat.

I'm an hour into today's work on the Melissa's Ghost retype, which took a surprising amount of tech savvy to enable. The why of that may be summarized thusly:

Running Word Perfect 5.1 (for DOS) on Windows 7.

I got a new laptop recently. It's another Dell Inspiron 15. It differs from my previous Dell Inspiron 15 in that it meets certain required criteria such as having a CD/DVD-ROM that functions and a chassis that isn't coming apart at the corners and video drivers (I think it's the video drivers) that do not cause the computer to crash when I switch from AC power to battery power. Also enough processor speed and memory that simple multitasking doesn't bring the whole system to a crawl.

These are important concerns. And then there's this other key difference: the new laptop is running Windows 7. My previous ran XP. The world of 64-bit operating system is entirely new to me as of May 2010. And it became a scary, scary place when I copied over WP 5.1 from the old laptop to the new and discovered that it would not run.

I should have been prepared. I should have read this article. I hadn't. It's on my to-do list.

At this point, it's not unreasonable to ask, as some have, why I persist in using WP 5.1 in the year 2010. Well. The answer is somewhere between "Because it is a superior piece of word processing software" and "Rawr you kids back in my day rawr get off my lawn." It goes something like this:

It's 1992. I'm a sophomore in high school. I'm taking as an elective course a semester-long writing workshop in the fancy-dancy computer lab. The computer lab is full of Macs. The computer my parents just bought is a PC running Windows 3.1. To work on the same document at home on Microsoft Works and at school on MS Word for Mac requires a very clunky conversion process. I complain, I am overheard, I am soon the proud owner of a quietly pirated copy of Word Perfect 5.1. MS Word for Mac can convert from and to WP 5.1 for DOS. Life is good.

Almost 20 years later, just about everything I've ever seriously written is in WP 5.1 format. Open Office will read that natively, sure, but I don't want to use Open Office as my writing studio. I'm 20-years familiar with WP 5.1. I've got it's weird commands mostly memorized. I am accustomed to a mouse-free, keyboard-only environment. The blocky, monospace on-screen font fades into the background for me. And the mental shift I get from writing in a DOS-based environment helps stave off the distraction of knowing that the entire Internet is waiting for me to drop in and waste the day away.

Put simply: I'm used to WP 5.1, I'm comfortable there, and it's as close to the bare essence of words on a page as I can get while still using a word processor at all. That's the experience I want, and I don't care if Windows 7 is going to be all snobby about 20-year-old software.

So I spent a bunch of time on Google, discovered DOSBox, then figured out how to reconfigure its keyboard commands so it would quit stomping on Word Perfect's keyboard commands, and then belatedly discovered the above-mentioned website with its clear and sophisticated instructions on how to do what I did only much better and more easily and felt very, very silly. But that doesn't matter! I get to do this!

So that on the left is yWriter, the novel-editing software I spent most of November 2009 inside. On the right is DOSBox running WP 5.1, in which I'm typing up the new draft. And running along the top left is FocusBooster, a timer application.

And that's my current writing environment. Ta-da!

"First Breath" has sold. To a professional market, even. Which is a first for me. (Come to think of it, Ideomancer was my first semi-pro sale of fiction this decade. Damn, 2010 rocks!)

On the one hand, this means that the ongoing worldbuilding discussion with my friend is unlikely to result in a significant revision. On the other hand, that's totally OK and I know she'll understand.

This weekend: Floating on euphoria, squeeing to my nearest and dearest, having an extremely short attention span because squee!

Tonight: Angsting over writing the requested bio. What the hell does anyone put in those things? I mean, when they can't say "is the best-selling author of this, that and the other novel."

Tomorrow: Working on the next thing, because there is always a next thing.

And I'm not sure the Ant thing will be the next thing, because if there's something I've learned from this experience, it's this: Write at the intersection of passion and fear. That story that won't get out of your head, that you're kind of ashamed to let anyone else see? That's the one. Get to it.

Bonus points if it came to you in a dream.

I am thinking of another story that matches that description. And, while there's something to be said for the comic relief of something like that Ant thing, that other story does match the description. Which means now it won't get out of my head.

But tomorrow I get to see a bunch of writer-type friends downtown for my usual Tuesday Lunchtime At Atlas thing, and I will probably squee at them a bit more before settling down to writing the next thing. Also! I have a new laptop! It isn't falling apart, and its CD/DVD-ROM works, and it doesn't crash when I unplug it! Tomorrow is totally going to be show-and-tell day.

Big news: "The Day the Sidewalks Melted" is now live for you to read in Ideomancer volume 9, issue 1. Read it here. And since it won't take you all that much time to read, go read the rest of the free, online magazine while you're at it. The other stories are breathtaking, the poetry likewise, and the reviews illuminating.

And consider donating, since that's how the staff of Ideomancer keep the magazine going and the contributors paid year after year.

Meanwhile, I'm working on a new story, which is news and really oughtn't to be. That is, I ought to be doing it often enough--writing new stories--that it's not newsworthy. But I finally realized, considering the woefully slow progress I've been making on finishing the NaNoWriMo 2009 draft of Melissa's Ghost (I'm afraid John's getting the proof copy for an anniversary present; it wasn't done in time for his birthday), that putting off everything else until I'm done with that job is a recipe for unhappiness.

Recipe for happiness:

• One story idea that won't let you go.
• A portable Smith-Corona that's gathering dust.
• Five minutes reviewing the typewriter's instruction manual.
• About two and a half hours.

It's not actually a new story, but it's such a revision over the first time it showed up that it might as well be. What's it about? Well, in one sense, it's about succubi and how they reproduce. In another, it's about lives of ennui, lives of substance, and profound transformation. It's probably only going to be about 1500 words by the end of the day.

The end of the day will not be later than this weekend. I have promised it to the twice-monthly critique group. No, not the original typewritten draft. It'll get retyped into WordPerfect and revised first. Then emailed.

See, I'm not entirely a luddite here. (I mean, look! Blog post! On the internet!) It's just that sometimes, to recover from a stall, I have to switch from my daily laptop to something a little more "me plus words minus everything else". Sometimes I need to dust off the Ancient Decrepit DOS 6.2 Compaq, hide away from the wifi and from all my fancy editing tools. And sometimes I need to escape the bureaucracy of file names and directory trees and run away to where the paper shows up before the words rather than after, to where each letter has weight and the price of going too fast is a key-jam or the whiteout ribbon.

And sometimes I just need that immediate reward of a bell going "ding!" every time I invent a new ten-word sequence or so. "Go you! Now come up with another ten. Good job! Again!"

Seriously. You should try it. It's refreshing.

I was tired yesterday. I'd started the day early, and after getting back from the Boulder Municipal Airport, I was not, Enn Oh Tee Not intending to leave the house again. I was done. I'd had a lot of stress and dread leading up to that day (for all that flight instructors repeatedly assure me that a biannual flight review is nothing to stress over), and, having walked away from the appointment with a brand-new endorsement at the cost of a slightly bruised ego (stupid power-on stalls, stupid left-turning tendencies, stupid turn coordinator ball making me look stupid) I wasn't planning on doing anything resembling work for the rest of the day.

Writing dates? Not hardly. I had a date for a face-plant into my pillow, thanks.

I fired up Second Life over a late lunch, figuring I'd play some mindless clicky games at my favorite arcade/casino spots until I was ready to collapse. Which was when I got the Writers Guild group notice about the Milk Wood Writers' Meet.

"Hope you can join us for an hour (or so) of focused writing. Bring your WIPs or start a new one. Join us and create something!"

And I thought, oh, what the hell. I haven't done my Morning Pages today; I should at least do that. So I teleported to the attached location and pulled my notebook and pen out of my bag.

The Milk Wood is a lovely forest scene, as you might expect, with trickling streams and crashing surf and swaying tree branches and birds that sing and fly in and out of sight. The Market, or Gypsy Camp, is a forest clearing between a small bridge and a big furnished caravan wagon.

In this clearing are several picnic benches. On each picnic bench is a candle, a stack of books, an apple, and a typewriter. Each object is scripted. You can light the candle, view the writing goals attached to the apple, and I forget what with the books.

The typewriter animates your avatar, of course.

And the effect is oddly compelling. Watching my avatar banging away at the keyboard, listening to the tap-tappity-tap-kaching!-tappity-tap-tap noises coming out of the computer speakers, I'm all, "Well, I might as well be writing too, mightn't I?" And it's not just Kavella Maa's typing that I'm hearing; the typing of other attendees is clearly audible as a series of separate tappity-taps. The space I'm sharing with other writers-in-action may not be physical, but it's absolutely real. It consecrates the hour and charges it with energy for the task. The other writers may in fact be puttering around the kitchen or visiting the bathroom, but from where I'm sitting, they look hard at work, and it gives me that added push to get my own work done.

As with most things Second Life, this simulation isn't meant to replace doing such things in person. But when local friends aren't available, when I don't have the energy to head out to a nearby cafe, or when I'm just craving the company of this particular group, this is a strangely satisfying version of Going On A Writing Date.

It's 1pm SLT on Mondays and Fridays. They are thinking of adding Wednesdays as well. Don't forget to tip your host. And if you're in the Boulder NaNoWriMo group, you will be hearing more about this on the forums come October.