author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

The Averatec is not yet returned from the grave, but its resurrection looms ever nearer. And before I go any further, I would like to make another shout-out, this time to Ryan, the tech at Boulder's Computer Renaissance outlet who helped me out so much today.

He called me around 1:00 this afternoon, said that after overnight testing my computer's hardware all checked out but that its WinXP system was beyond repair. He'd backed up the contents of my hard drive to the server, and everything was ready for me to pick up my computer and run the factory-provided recovery media on it.

So I did this. I walked it across the street to Cafe Bravo, ordered up some fine-tasting coffee, and began feeding CDs to the beast. Three CDs and one "Recovery Successful!" screen later, I was growling. That computer just wasn't booting up. It was doing stuff that looked remarkably like Monday afternoon's original breakdown. So back to CompRen I went.

Turns out that they'd tested the hard drive, but not the RAM. The RAM got tested forthwith. Even more forthwither, the RAM failed. Ah-ha. So out comes one stick. The remaining one tested good. The sticks got swapped. The other stick tested good. Both sticks back in. Again, test good. Ah-ha? Ryan ran through the recovery media, and this time met with success. Sometimes, apparently, connector pins can get oxidized, and all we have to do is wiggle the sticks, take them out and put them back in again maybe, and things will be fine. An hour later, my backed-up data had been copied onto the newly formatted machine, and I was on my way home. And either because it was a physical problem which means my extended warranty covers the labor, or because Ryan and CompRen are just that nice, I wasn't charged a cent.

Well, I got home. And I started up the computer. I did some preliminary customizing--downloading and installing Firefox, connecting to the home network and its workgroup, swapping the keyboard input default over to Dvorak. Then I started a blog entry.

Then I was staring into the Blue Screen Of Death. Of Physical Memory Dump, anyway.

Er.

I have not yet tried wiggling the RAM sticks, but I have tried rebooting. It went very soon into the deadly spiral of aborted startup attempts. I stopped it before it could start deleting sectors again. As far as I'm concerned, it's still dead.

But! My time today was fruitful in other ways. I got to watch Ryan take my hard drive and my RAM out of my laptop, which meant I learned for the first time just how easy it is to do. I mean, you just unscrew these panels and out they come! Which means any schmoe can do it! Even me! And they sell these $40 devices which turn your laptop hard drive into a USB jump drive in, like, seconds. So I think I can at least go buy one of those (or a suitable cable, $10-ish, for daisy-chaining the drive onto another computer) so I can move my data onto one of the home desktops. Then I could have access to my saved emails and address book and all (not to mention the latest changes to Becoming Sara Peltier), by tomorrow afternoon, even though Ryan won't be back in the shop to look at my flailing laptop beastie until Tuesday.

So life isn't so bad after all.

Meanwhile, I logged another half-hour on The Drowning Boy during my second stint at Cafe Bravo's, the one during which data was being copied back onto my laptop. I managed a few more paragraphs on chapter 11. I feel like I'm sneaking up this story, sort of sidling up to it by describing this or that character's feelings, bodily posture, snippets of dialogue. Sometimes that's the only way to find out what the story's doing.

Heck with it.

The Averatec laptop is in the shop. Its Windows XP install proved too far gone to repair. An attempt to load a new XP installation over the top (which, if successful, would have allowed me to boot up and actually get to my files) failed to the tune of "Cannot install. C:\ is corrupted." So here I wait, twiddling my thumbs, hoping that the files I was able to see on the disk during a CD boot to DOS operation are indeed recoverable.

And the novel? Apparently I hadn't backed it up once since beginning to work on it this month. Didn't back up a copy of the new chapter outline last week after the IHOP session. Didn't upload to the web server a copy of the novel after working on it in Indiana. I'm a ditz. A total ditz.

So I could continue working on it now, just leave a blank line with a ### in it to mark where the temporarily (knock on wood) unavailable version of the manuscript had progressed, but...

Heck with it.

There is no way that Becoming Sara Peltier would be ready for submission in the next week even if my laptop hadn't taken a nose dive. No, that's OK--Delacorte's Press Contest for a First Young Adult Novel is just going to go another year without my manuscript among its contestants.

Meanwhile, word on the street is that I'll hear one way or another about The Drowning Boy by the end of the month. And that novel was backed up along with everything else shortly after November ended. Copied to ZIP drive, burned to CD, the works. So. Today I dove back into it. When we last left Brian, he had finally met the mermaids. Things were very tense. I'd been uncertain how to get the tension to shift so that the story could continue--I sort of had him all curled up in a floating ball of used-to-be-human misery amidst personal demons and suchlike. But tonight, hanging out at the downtown Borders while my husband browsed the aisles, I finally had a spark that just might lead to the end of chapter 11. So that's all better.

So there's the novelling side of things. Back over on the technical difficulties side, I wanna give a shout out to Ken. He used to be a tech for Computer Renaissance back when I bought this Averatec and had the data recovered off the fatally flawed Toshiba Satellite. Now he's working down the street from me at PC Express. He took time out of a morning full of 'xtreme custom computer building to totally hold my hand through the Windows XP repair attempts. He knew I'd have to take it away to Comp Ren because of them holding my 3-year extended warranty--heck, he encouraged me to take it over there--but he took the time to help me out and provide moral support anyway. Damn cool guy, that Ken. You should totally haul your boxes over to PC Express for upgrades and give him some business.

(And super-duper thanks to Willow for pointing me in Ken's direction!)

So, life quite suddenly sucks. My computer has died.

Well, that's putting it a little overly strong. Life doesn't exactly suck, per se. I mean, John and I are in Bloomington, Indiana; we're staying with Cate; we're comfy and well-fed and in loving company. True, the Saints did not win last night, but you can't expect too much from your weekend. Life is actually pretty good.

But somewhere between hibernating my laptop yesterday morning and attempting to wake it back up again yesterday afternoon, Something Went Horribly Wrong. After I halted its unsuccesful Resume From Hibernate prrocess, it entered a cycle of disk checks during which it deleted many purportedly corrupted sectors, and then after gnawing on itself in this fashion for several minutes it utterly failed to recognize a bootable drive. I get the Averatec splash screen and then nothing but a blinking cursor.

Curses!

So today I pulled out my spiral notebook, wrote down the previous novel-editing session's final sentence from memory, and then tried mightly to keep going. Boy, what a comedown. I've used computers for so long that my handwriting is illegible, and my longhand writing mentality is all, like, "This is just freewriting and Morning Pages and stuff, why should I care about quality?"

Clearly I need to compose manuscript copy in longhand more often. It's no good to rely so completely on electricity and microprocessors.

So today I mostly spent trying to convince myself to write as though it mattered. Then I got a little into Sasha's seemingly unplanned meeting with her classmate crush in the Wilcox Plaza bookstore. And when I get back to Boulder I need to dig up my Windows XP Home Edition install disk, which I am assured exists and ought to be in my possession. I am skeptical of this, having no memory of bringing one home at the time of my laptop's purchase....

As for other things: In my opinion, The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe was very, very, very, very good. Faithful fans of the Narnia books, whether their interest is in the fantasy story or in the Christian allegory, all ought to be well pleased. I am, however, a little troubled by an acquaintance's concern over the "appropriateness" of Lucy's friendship with the faun Tumnus. "I mean, he's, like, ten years older than her and he goes around shirtless! Is it right that they're going around holding hands all the time?" Is this an issue that ought even to occur? For heaven's sake, it's like watching Finding Neverland and begin convinced, despite James Barrie's protestations otherwise (which, by the way, the audience is supposed to believe), that the adult author is sexually involved with his children playmates. My goodness, we live in a corrupt age.

Other than that--other than having my mind now forever tainted by the previously unheard-of concept of little Lucy being preyed on by her best friend in Narnia--I have no complaints. Well, I was unimpressed by Liam Neeson's voicing of Aslan. But maybe that's unfair. Probably for me to be satisfied you'd have to get freakin' God in on that role. Well, God or James Earl Jones. Either one will do.

And in yet other news, the NaNoWriMo article in dirt has come out. Whee! Go read it right now!

Yes indeed. I had to turn all--of--these into this - kind - of - thing to get the NaNoWriMo Word Count Validator to agree, sort of, with WordPerfect 5.1, because the former apparently doesn't count double-dashes as word separators, but, you know, whatever. I've hit "THE END" and I've hit 50K+ and life is good.

The last IHOP All-Nighter of the Month is breaking up. Two of us validated our word counts and got our purple winner bars right here (and winner icons and winner certificats and happy little banners on our profiles) along with a lot of applause, and one more of us is bound to manage it in the next half hour. A photographer from Boulder's free paper dirt got a lot of pictures (look for them on December 12). The blue pencil got to be showed off. Much fun was, in fact, got.

And that's all for tonight. Tomorrow: The TGIO Party at Conor's! The Baking Of The Fruitcake! The Beginning Of The Lightning Edit Round On Becoming Sara! Stay tuned.

Hi-ho. Yes, writing continues. It continues to be a bit behind schedule, but not such that success cannot occur. I'm really closing in on the final scene now. I'm hoping to bag about 3,000 words today and another 3,000 tomorrow--that should put me at "The End" as well as over the 50K mark.

Here's a bit of word count trivia. Word Perfect 5.1 counts the words on either end of a double-dash (like this--see?) as two words. NaNoWriMo.org's text file validator counts them as one. When I uploaded a text file of my manuscript and saw a 300 word drop between my count and its count, that turned out to be why. So, aspiring NaNoers who use this puctuation mark: either shoot for 50,500 just to be safe, or replace all "--" with " -- " in your manuscript just to be safe.

And another bit of trivia: I would have started on my novelling for the day by now if it wasn't for those damned spammers. After an hour on the phone today with my ISP (DrakNet is good) I finally figured out how they've been exploiting my email forms over at Littlebull.com--a trick that resulted in that web site getting suspended over the weekend. I had to stop everything I was doing to roll through all my pop-up contact webforms and seal any header injection holes I could find. Grrr. This is me going "grrrr." Me ain't happy.

But! Me is now writing. And any potential spammers what get between me and writing, oooh their ears are gonna be burning.

The manifesto obliges me to post every day, and to keep my post relatively centered around writing. Sunday's goth club outing¹ is not a valid subject for blogging, nor is the delightful Celtic Tatting book² Sarah got me. Ditto the wedding present³ I am frantically knitting for my friend and his bride-to-be.

So here's a very boring post to say, "Hey, look! I got a whole bunch of words written since last post!" In case you care, we're up to Chapter Thirteen, in which the talemouse meets the Bookwyrm. In my own opinion, which isn't very humble because in first draft stage my opinion is all that matters, it was pretty darn cool. I got to describe how Rakash Sketterkin finds his way into the Bookwyrm's lair, and to define the true nature of the Bookwyrm's horde (the actual horde, not the bookstore named after it). To describe and define those things, I had to decide and discover them. Yay NaNoWriMo! Daily word count quotas are good for me.

Now, I need to figure out why fictional characters don't want to go anywhere near the Bookwyrm. At least, not in their parent plotlines. The Wyrm probably wouldn't threaten their existence in their own plotlines.

In other news, the battery in my Ancient Decrepit Compaq Contura Aero appears to have joined the ranks of the undead. Or the resurrected, I'm not sure which. The computer has been running on battery power for 30 minutes without showing a drop in the battery charge meter, which is a huge improvement over last week's "pull out the plug and the computer immediately dies" routine. Yay zombie battery! Maybe next time I lend Willow my Averetec, I'll actually be able to use the Compaq on battery power.

And that's all.

(1. I'm sorry, I have no pictures to share of me gothed up and dancing to a slightly sped-up spin of VNVNation's "Neverending Light". Nor have I pictures of John, Sarah, or Jaerin, at least not such that I'm at liberty to share. Nor have I sustained actual bruises from the collision occasioned by two stoned dimwits who started rolling around on the floor and using us as pinball bumpers.)

(2. Dude! I had been trying to figure out how to do celtic knotworks all weekend! Apparently the answer is to tat chains, not loops, and use a paperclip to thread the chains into knots. Very cool.)

(3. The wedding is on December 3rd. If I knit really fast, there's hope. If I knit really fast and stop swapping threads or either notice more quickly when I've swapped threads or just give up on this whole "knit two socks at once" idea.)

Dangit! 1,700 shiny new words, and no way to update my word count at NaNoWriMo.org! The page is CSS-wacked and every link is broken due to passing through a broken session_confirm.php file. I'm sure they're working on it--in fact, I'm positive they're working on it, because the CSS-wackiness is somewhat different than it was an hour ago. But meanwhile, here I am with no way to get in.

For the record, I got 1,700 shiny new words written this morning. I'd like to raise that to 2,000, but I have returned the story to the point at which it beached itself the first time I tried to write it several years ago--before I knew that this was a sequel to The Bookwyrm's Horde--and I still don't know where it goes next. I'll probably work on the whole Snowflake Method of Novel Plotting thing some more. That'll help me figure out what scenes need writing.

Meanwhile, me and a fellow NaNoWriMo participant/WFC attendent I met on the bus from Chicago to Madison are sitting in a nice little cafe called Michelangelo's, enjoying the atmosphere, art, and free wi-fi. This is where I wrote my 1,700 shiny new words. I've run into a few more familiar faces, folks that tend to be at WFC and WHC every year, and we said "Hi" and "How's your year been" and "What's your name again? Sorry." And we're looking forward to finally getting all registered at 1:00 and going to the first panel at 2:00. The weather's gorgeous and I actually slept in a bed last night.

I am human again, and life, once again, is good. Nyah!

(Oh, and NaNoWriMo.org is fully functional once more, or at least close enough for rock 'n roll. Hooray!)

This'll be a long, long entry, and another one having nothing to do with work on any particular manuscript (though thoughts of them arise). As writing goes, I've been a bum these last few days. The excuses are rife, and run the gamut from office work to home improvement, from social engagements to bicycle maintenance.

Also sleep and irregular sleeping habits. The late-late-late Wednesday night at the IHOP lead to a following Thursday of sleepwalking from obligation to obligation. (I really need to get better at all-nighter recovery.) Then on Friday my husband and I took the living room apart and painted one of the walls thus revealed. Saturday involved finishing touches on the paint job, an initial stab at reassembling the living room, and watching Disc 2 of Fushigi Yugi over a pot-luck dinner with friends.

My interest in the show flagging as it progressed (I must be broken; everyone else thinks it improves with each episode), I took a stab at working on the code for this blog. Discovered some huge CSS problems in Internet Explorer (y'all might have said something!) and tried to fix them. Created the Category and Manuscript sorting menus now available in the left margin. Ended up with something that works in both browsers, except that one entry persists, for reasons unknown to me, in wonkifying itself in Internet Explorer, and only when my I-can-see-it-you-can't editing menu isn't displayed.

(But, hey! W3C says it validates as HTML 4.0 Transitional!)

And I've been working my way through a stack of library books. John and I hit the library a couple Thursdays ago, and I started in on Viable Paradise's Suggested Research Reading For Aspiring Fantasists. I have now finally read The King In Yellow, along with three science fiction novels by Jack Vance and one of Nesbit's children's fantasies that I hadn't gotten my hands on before.

Also in that stack was a last-minute impulse pick, The Visitor by Sheri S. Tepper. Which leads to the reason for the title of this post, here, and indeed its existence. I finished reading that book just now, and thoughts of it, aided by too much Coca Cola during the anime viewing and too much garlic during dinner, have been impeding all attempts to get to sleep. So I figured, what the hell: I should get up and write down those thoughts, because if I'm going to have insomnia I might as well share it with the world.

Thought The First: I do think Ms. Tepper has totally given up on the human race.

No, really. Her characters are always striving for a better world, but they are without exception merely carriers of good intentions whose effectiveness depends on a nudge, or even a shove, from the angels. Or the fairies. Or various imaginations of Deity. And as her books' publication dates get later and later (if the sampling I've read is any indication) these supernatural beings have been increasingly wrathful ones. They remorselessly sweep away the chaff of humanity, using disease and catastrophe to solve the problem of overpopulation and unfailingly leaving alive those open-minded humans that are either the deities' annointed heroes or those that are amenable to being shepherded by said heroes. The epilogues invariably show these virtuous survivors making plans to build themselves a new Eden.

Which is why I say "earned utopias." The deus ex machina doesn't simply wave a wand and create paradise; it pushes a sort of reset button that cleanses the world of those who don't want/deserve paradise, preparing the way for those left to work hard at creating paradise themselves, something that is only possible after the reset enacted by, or the powers granted by, the deus.

These are not books that show readers the way back to the Garden. At most, these books preach a particular morality--one I admit I agree with: a doctrine of feminism and environmentalism and responsible reproductive choice and religious tolerance. But these values are not themselves what saves humanity. Instead, the message seems to be, "If you don't adhere to these values, the Avenging Angel will delete you. Then, the Avenging Angel will hand over the keys to the kingdom to those people who do adhere to these values." The reader comes away not with ideas for saving the world but merely with a better understanding of the author's dogma. Those of us who agree with the author's values might indulge momentarily in her fantasies of vengeful nature Goddesses eating up whole cities, or fungal symbiotes imposing worldwide harmony, but we don't come away with any sort of pragmatic direction for real world activism.

And it's not that I expect pragmatic direction from every science fiction novel, but I do expect to see some faith in humanity's ability to save itself without depending on divine intervention. Or on the godly destruction of the unrighteous, for that matter! Recent Tepper novels have a lot more in common with premillenial dispensationalistic fantasies than I think her fans (myself among them) would like to admit.

Thought the Second: Tepper's apocalypses don't follow real-life social dynamics.

I yearn to write a short story whose punchline is "On the last day was the Rapture, when in a twinkling of an eye God's chosen people were taken away to Heaven, and the environmentalists inherited the earth." But real-life catastrophes don't work that way. Catastrophes don't discriminate between the virtuous and the bigots. They do discriminate, but not in ways conducive to righteousness.

For instance, look at New Orleans. If we were living in a Tepper novel, by and large the breached levee would be a means for Deity to cleanse the city of corrupt politicians, children of undeserved privilege, and bigots of both the racial and the religious kind. Those left behind would be the poor, the black, the gays and lesbians, the voodoo practitioners, the strippers, the prostitutes, all of them working together to survive and to rebuild their home in the image of good egalitarian ideals. But look what really happened: those with means got the hell out, and many of those left behind--too poor to own a car, or too old or infirm to travel, those that could not afford to abandon what little they had, those with little more to their names than their pride and their idea of home--simply drowned. The survivors have been denied food, water, aid, and dignity by the botched plans of the well-intentioned in government and the disinterest of less-well-intentioned government figures. They've even been denied attempts to leave under their own power. In their starving desperation, the stranded survivors, having learned that it's every man for himself, have in many cases turned on each other.

But that brings us back to deus ex machina. In a Tepper novel, the flood wouldn't just be the inevitable result of a 200-mile-wide Category Four hurricane and the underfunding of the levees. It would be guided by some supernatural figure (maybe the ghost of Marie LeVeaux) who would take an active hand in saving the sheep and drowning the goats. Heroes would arise in its wake bearing gifts and miraculous powers, ready to smack down government obstructionists (who'd all get eaten by alligators) and lead the poor but honest survivors to rebuild their home in a manner condoned and encouraged by Mother Nature.

I'm not sure I'd want to live in that world, tell you the truth. I want to see humanity win out against both aversity and averice without the crutch of avenging angels, super powers, misanthropic reset buttons, or any of the other artificial oversimplifications Tepper perpetrates on her worlds.

Of course, I'll be the first to admit that the short story I'm starting to write about the rebuilding of New Orleans will probably fall afoul of all of the above. But if I do my job right, the supernatural aid will exact a price, and the ethical situations therein won't be monochrome.

Or maybe it will be just as much a wish-fulfillment fantasy as any of Tepper's god-enforced utopias. Maybe the story will evoke not hope in humanity but longing for something else. I don't know yet; it's not finished. But I can swear this much: it won't be anything I need feel ashamed of longing for.

Hey, check this out. The Sheraton Mountain Vista has wi-fi in the lobby. Why the hell'd it take me so long to figure that out? Not that I minded going to Loaded Joe's for my internet fix, but when all I want to do is check email, Google a bit of info, or upload a blog entry, it's nice to have that two minutes from my door rather than ten.

Of course, internet in our room would be even better, but Starwood has not sprung for wireless repeaters. If I go out on the balcony I can sometimes get onto some unsecured private network in the area--its SSID is neither an out-of-the-box default, nor is it obviously related to a neighboring resort--but the flies out there are something awful. And computer monitors? Are ten-star fly attractors.

We'll be driving back to Boulder in a few hours. John wants to be at work for 8:00 AM, and he wants to stop at home and shave first. It's going to be a night of very little sleep and a morning of much earliness.

Chapter 10 is almost done. Brian has been reunited with Mike for the second time, and this time he knows he's not dreaming. I left off with them coming up to the surface to babble happy greetings to each other. No real information has yet been exchanged. The continuation of this conversation will need some careful engineering: Mike will tell Brian how he came to be where he is, a tale that will include admission of unsavory deeds which the elder brother utterly fails to regret; Brian will be shocked, horrified, and as disbelieving as I can paint him without making him look like I rolled him a 5 in Intelligence. That's because his ability to continue relating to his brother after this conversation will depend on how much he can convince himself that he had misheard, or misinterpreted, Mike's tale, and his journey from "he didn't really kill anyone, did he?" to "that bastard has to die" is supposed to take most of the first three quarters of the book. Once again, I've got a lot of delicate psychological tweaking to do here. It's a problem I'd like to sleep on, so I'm stopping here for the night.

And you know what? It's September. You know how far away October 1 is? Not very. You know what that means? Time to haul out Sara Peltier and get that manuscript ready for Delacorte. When we last left off, Sasha was walking into town to return Anubia's video rental and, unbeknownst to her, to run into her crush and find out whether he notices her magical self-image makeover. At this moment, I forget exactly what I'd intended to do with that. I expect tomorrow will involve a lot of rereading.

See you in Boulder.

Heycheckitoutgadgets!

The screenshot you are now looking at comes to you courtesy of Sinner Computing. The programs name sounds a lot like an intentional double entendre, considering the name of the company and all, but a glance at the other programs in their line-up seems to indicate that it's just a happy coincidence which does not represent their normal naming conventions. Too bad, really. But that's not the point!

The point is, it counts seconds. Then it stops counting seconds, if you've told it when to do so. Then, it makes noises.

Which, of course, is very, very useful. It means I can press "Start," ALT-TAB over to WordPerfect 5.1 (in its itty-bitty DOS window, cho kawaii), then write and write and write resisting the urge to look at the clock until an hour or two later when a pop-up window pops up saying "Finished!" and Gaelic Storm's version of "Nancy Whiskey" starts playing out of my laptop speakers.

Which is what I did today. And I only ALT-TABbed over to check where the count-down was at once.

OK, maybe twice.

(Oh. Yeah. About Sunday and Monday. I took Sunday off. That was on purpose. And Monday, I came home from the office with a headache but nevertheless got all interested in my spinning wheel, which I hadn't really touched for something like a year. Decided it was about time I finally plied together those two bobbins of dyed angora that had been languishing neglected all this time. Then went on to make a grossly overspun single ply out of our anime night host's puppy-doggy's combed-out undercoat (the collecting of which Saturday night we can blame for the sudden reawakening of interest in home-spun yarn). It knitted up a lot like mohair, oddly enough. I'd tell you what breed of doggy it is, if only I could remember. It's one of them husky-wolfie-looking things. Anyway, by the time I was done, my headache had gotten all worse-like and I went to bed early. Which only proves, once again, that writing has to come before other pursuits, just in case of migraine.)