author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Another non-fiction-related update*: Starting this past weekend, I'm now blogging at BurnzPost.com. This takes the place of SplendidGardening.com (now defunct); same editor, same schedule, similar contract. This month I'm posting about whatever comes to mind. Next month I might be assigned a subject. We'll see. I'm trying to keep my posts somewhat literary, in hopes of snagging that topic assignment. Libraries, writing, and publishing are subjects that have come up so far. If you're already checking in with me here at the actually writing blog, those might be subjects that interest you.

And just as a reminder, you can pretend to be a fan (you know, get in practice for when I finally publish that break-out novel) and subscribe to Everything Bloggity That Niki Does via my homemade handcrafted UberRSS! The direct feed URL is http://www.nicolejleboeuf.com/allrss.php, and you can subscribe via your LiveJournal friends list here.

*Non-fiction-related updates will stop very soon, because I'm about to dive into a short story rewrite. Yes! It's long overdue, and it's gonna happen TODAY. About this, more later.

Today I could have easily been overtaken even by a very out-of-shape Muse. I found me a Yule Log lying alongside the Boulder Creek Path, and I strapped it to my bike (cf. illo). The rest of my ride home was slow, careful, containing as few sharp turns as possible, and punctuated by cheers and thumbs-up from random passers-by. As far as bicycling machismo goes, I have nothing to prove.

Also, yWriter. Can it be used for short fiction as well as for novels? Why, yes it can. But why would you? Possibly because you have some scenes in your head just waiting to be written down, but you're not sure what order they go in or what other scenes to use as glue in between. Watch out for that NaNoWriMo mindset, though. You know the one. That's where you just have your characters totally babble because you've got a word quota to meet, dammit! Well, you don't. You just need to end up with a draft of a short story, is all.

I do not yet have a draft of a short story. But I've got almost all my scenes in place. I hope to get it to Full First Draft tomorrow, maybe even upload it to my fellow VPXmen. I want this guy out the door early.

No, the latest goal post has not yet been met. But shush. Let's not talk about that. I am in the middle of a laptop transition. Finally. Yes, the warranty company bought out my broken Averatec, and after two Averatecs committed suicide on me, I'm hopping to a brand with, I hope, more longevity. This here is almost exactly what the new machine'll look like; think WinXP Home instead of Pro, think Intel Core Duo T2050 instead of T2300, and you'll have the basic idea. (And yes, I intend to run Guild Wars on it.)

It came in today. It's had its OS reinstalled to get rid of the various hidden partitions on which Dell was probably smuggling government documents or maybe the secret recipe for Coca Cola. Its drivers are being updated as we speak. Guild Wars will be installed and tried out, because the Computer Renaissance tech has it up and running on his Dell and wants to run a side-by-side comparison. And I'm totally OK with that.

Before long, I shall be about $400 down, one laptop up, and in the middle of transferring my entire life from hard drive to hard drive. I'm having a good day.

More later. With writing and stuff.

So apparently my problems are a matter of table structure, not lost data. Whee.

Confession: I have been woefully bad at keeping myself educated as my ISP traveled upward through the MySQL versions over the years, and the tables I created back in the 3.23 days, when the default was ISAM, did not play well with the move to 4.1, where ISAM is deprecated and MyISAM is preferred. I ought to have converted them over, but I have been ignorant and did not know to do so. So to fix things, I think I need to be given access to the backups from earlier in the month so that I can insert the data into manually recreated MyISAM tables. Because I really don't want to make the support staff at my ISP endure the pain in the butt of taking care of it for me. Because it would be a big pain in the butt for them, and not one they're contracted for. They'll take it on out of the goodness of their hearts, which I only come to appreciate more and more as situations like this painfully educate me about MySQL programming--but they oughtn't to have to do so.

So we're still working on it. Hang in there, Story and Dream Vortex participants. All will be as it was before, give or take the last two weeks of Story additions.

Meanwhile, still no progress in the writing. It's damn hard to concentrate when your little web mini-empire (mwahahaha! empire) is lying in chunks around your ankles. Did you notice that my entire domain here went down today? Just a glitch, but on top of everything, seeing one of those slimy "Your Web Site Here!" pages show up instead of your blog can be a real downer. (OK, it wasn't all that slimy, as such pages go. But it did have that annoyingly ubiquitous list of search terms and all.) I've been playing a lot of mind-numbing puzzle games and hitting the "get new email" button in Thunderbird with great frequency. (Sorry, Comcast.)

Tomorrow, Sunday, I hope to improve my productivity. I have lots of notes scribbled all over "Putting Down Roots" and will email it tomorrow night, in whatever form I've got it into, to the Borderlands Writer's Boot Camp. So my motivation to get hopping on the rewrite is to avoid getting told what I already know is wrong with the story, and instead get told things about the story I didn't already know. Otherwise, what a waste of an enrollment fee it would be!

I would just like to say, right now, that--all MySQL discomforts aside--I am very glad I am hosting with Drak.Net and not with another web site. Specifically, I am glad I am hosting with a company whose policy is not to pull the plug on a customer within the hour of receiving an abusive phone call from someone who doesn't know the DMCA from the YMCA.

The ignorant screaming meemy in question is Barbara Bauer, one of the Twenty Worst Agents (according to Preditors and Editors, and Miss Snark, both of whom know a thing or two).

The foolish and possibly dishonest web host owner would be Stephanie Cordray, who gave the good people at AbsoluteWrite one hour after that phone call to grab their data before she took down the site.

Do you know how much useful crap is at AbsoluteWrite? 7,000+ writers in a forum well known, among other things, for being a home to the Bewares and Background Checks forum and the Learn Writing With Uncle Jim thread, both of which have saved many a newbie writer from falling into the hands of, well, scammers such as Barbara Bauer. And that's just the forum. The main site is full of online classes, articles, and all sorts of good stuff.

You know what else? While the funeral meats were still warm, so to speak, Stephanie Cordray resurrected her own writer's community. Conflict of interest much?

So. The one time I was implicated in anything unsavory at all--and that was when a spammer hijacked one of my email-me forms--Drak.net's owner worked it out with me. She did have to temporarily suspend the account in order to shut down the spammer's access, but soon after that we spent about 2 hours on the phone trying to figure out how spam was managing to get sent through their smtp via me, and how to stop it. Right now, even as I write, she's digging up the "last good" backups for littlebull.com and dreamvortex.net so that those sites can be restored. (Thankfully, there was a good, recent backup of my writing database available where I could get it; that's why this blog is now error free. But for the other sites, sadly, I only have access to backups made after things exploded. Sorry, Story participants and Dream sharers.) Sure, I have my quibbles, no one's perfect, mistakes happen--but even the woes of this week are far outweighed by the peace of mind I get from knowing that my ISP have nothing but the best intentions, upon which they do act.

My ISP would never, ever do to me what Stephanie Cordray did to AbsoluteWrite.

In short: Thank you, Drak.Net, for not being evil.

The laptop? Hard drive dead. Data gone.

The blog and other websites? Data also gone. Some tables just got irretrievably futzed during the upgrade. I'd restore them from my local backups, except... see above. Lost all data on laptop. The backups on the server also appear to be futzed.

So unless my ISP has backups I don't know about (waiting to hear about that now), I'm looking at a huge honking amount of data loss. I'm going to have to recreate a bunch of my writing database from memory and scratch. As for the other websites, they're just going to be gone. Sorry, dreamers and story participants. Your posts are quite probably kaput.

Once again, I urge everybody reading this to backup your data often! Daily, if possible! In multiple places!

*sigh*

The actual writing is safe, and I have a story I should be working on. Not to mention several other projects. So... off I go with heavy heart and inexorable purpose.

1. An upgrade to MySQL 4.1 has appeared to make all SELECT statements that JOIN tables from two different databases erroneous: Can't find file: 'manuscripts.MYI' (errno: 2) That's why you're seeing icky error messages up top the page and no manuscript titles in their blue boxes attached to each entry. I'm working on it.
2. My laptop died last night. At least, the OS installation appears hosed. I woke up this morning ready to dump all the hard drive data onto another computer, only to find I can't get to the hard drive on an Averatec 3200 Series laptop. Another trip to Computer Renaissance it is! (And maybe breakfast at LePeep's while I'm at it.)

Just a brief announcement here:

If you own a Canon BJ-10sx (that's a 12ish-year-old portable inkjet printer) and you have been frustrated trying to get it to print anything beyond gibberish to your modern laptop over a parallel-to-USB adapter cable...

That is, if you have ever found yourself in a situation akin to the one in which I found myself whilst on a train to San Francisco (I had a three-plug extension cord, the coach seat next to the outlet, and the agog admiration of the coach car steward for essentially bringing my entire office onboard)...

If you're there, and you're just about to throw your ancient printer right out the window...

Don't.

Re-attach the automatic sheet feeder, flip DIP switch #1 back into the ON position, and all will be well.

...On the other hand, the dang thing is now working just fine even without the auto feeder attached. Why it chose to spew gibberish while I desperately needed to print out my story for Nancy's workshop, but is quite innocently printing out perfect test pages now, I don't even pretend to know. Maybe it was just being perverse. Regardless, I will refrain from acts of violence. Yes I will.

Hit my deadline. Got paid. The world continues to turn.

Now... back to life as usual.

More later. Right now, running backups. Have you backed up your writing recently? You better! Go on--it'll give you something to do while I figure out how best to dance for everybody's amusement.

So those three chapters got another round of polishing, and the synopsis got whittled down to 900 words. And every one of those words was wanted, let me tell you.

Let me tell you something else. FedEx Kinkos charges $0.49 per page on their black-and-white printer. Fifty cents! For one sheet! One crappy cover letter: Fifty cents! One crappy 900 word synopsis: Two bucks! I'm damn glad I printed out the 9,100 word three-chapter writing sample on a friend's laser printer instead. That one was almost twenty bucks long. Next time, I'm-a goin' price-shopping. There's another copy center 'cross the street from the Kinkos; they might offer more reasonable prices.

Or I might just get my printer nozzle cleaned out and print from home like I used to.

Never, never, never-never never feed your Canon i450 generic-compatible ink. Hold out for genuine Canon ink. Or you'll get drop-shadows and blurs in your printouts and boy will you be sorry.

So, yeah. Application to VP going into the mail mañana.