Thursday, July 22, 2010

Lows and Highs

Writing has been at a standstill the last couple of weeks. It sucks. Granted, I seem to have been unusually busy with... stuff and... things. I don't know what, but I've felt busy. But I've also been slacking off. I suppose I'm frustrated with Chapter 15 not coming together neatly for me. I'm torn between trying to fix the existing version or starting the chapter over blank-slate style and pasting back in some of the better chunks from the earlier draft. Either of those approaches will involve a lot of tedious editing, the sort I especially hate to do. So I've been putting it off and accomplishing very little.

Luckily, "very little" isn't quite the same as "nothing." I've hand-written some passages for Chapter 15 that will fit nicely if I can figure out where to put them and how to re-write the chapter. Also, a couple of nights ago I had a brainstorm about some of the socio-political aspects of what will be my second novel if and when I write it. It was important, thematic stuff that would be central to the book and it helped me figure out key aspects of how and why some major stuff is going on at the beginning of the novel. So that's good.

My kids and I are also progressing nicely toward our upcoming orange-belt tests at LaValle's Karate. The true test is during "Spotlight Week" which is a couple weeks before the "graduation" night when we receive our new belts. I had to put in a lot of extra time with the kids to help them master their kata, as they'd really been struggling with parts of it for a while. And it worked! They nailed it on their spotlights, and my wife and I did ours just fine, too. Tonight we'll be doing our self-defense techniques, so I need to work with the kids on those, also.

So there's a low and a couple of highs, as promised in the title. One other piece of good news, of course, is that I've been updating Virtual Vellum pretty regularly for the last couple of weeks, huh? Go me! It may or may not continue long-term, but I'm feeling pretty good about it anyway.

At some point soon, I want to write an article about Dropbox. It's a neat way of simultaneously backing up your files while you share them among different computers (like your PC and your laptop or iPad, for example) and I'm quite happy with it. You get 2 gig of online space for free, plus another 250 meg just for completing a 6-step tour of the service that includes installing the client application on a second computer and sharing a folder with somebody else. You can also get additional 250-meg blocks of free storage by getting your friends to create their own free Dropbox accounts. The link above takes you to my "share with friends" page, so if you're interested in this functionality (or just want to help me get another 250 mb of free storage space), by all means give it a click and sign up. Like I said, I'll write a more detailed review soon, though not necessarily tomorrow (we'll have another late night at karate tonight, which competes for my blog-writing time). My initial reaction is unreservedly positive, however - I'm sold on Dropbox and very happy with the service so far.

2 comments:

  1. Oops - wish I'd read this before I installed DropBox yesterday!! :( Sorry...

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  2. No harm done. Extra free space would be nice, but 250 MB will become moot when I sign up for the paid (50 GB) version anyway.

    Glad you like the tool, though!

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