No Witty Title At This Hour

Oh happy day,
Oh happy day,
Since I forgot,
Since I forgot,
To add to my blog!

What happened can be described in one word... nothing. Well, nothing online, and nothing much work related. I fiddled around with replacing the power supply in a computer and finding out that while there is power, nothing else seems to be happening. Have to take it somewhere and get some help. I don't know what problem could be. I had two hard drives with two different operating systems and I tried them together, and apart. Turn on the power, the lights come on, and that's it. I might think it was the video card gone, but it worked in the computer store with a short-lived plug in from another power supply. Its hard to tell with these old drives. Is it set to slave or master? Does it have to be set at all if its the only drive? Is the CMOS looking for the old drive? Is the CMOS actually still working or did the battery go and there is no more CMOS. Who knows. Software is my forte.

Editing on the e-book continued on for a bit and has since stalled. I had given myself a date to begin sales, but it looks like it won't be met. Chances are it won't be available until January. I had hoped to use the fixed computer to run Word 97. Yeah I know, old as the hills software. It's a nightmare looking at Office XP. Priced at greater than $450 it seems criminal to put on a computer I only paid $700 for, even if I did supply my own HDD, monitor, DVD burner, etc. If I'm going to spend that kind of money it's going to be a nice big LCD monitor to replace this CRT one, which is valiantly trying not to die on me. The contrast is shot on it, and there's a vertical line that wavers about.

The train of thought derailed, typical. The reason I need Word, and not this substitute that I'm using is because I need to fiddle with paper-sizes and this thing doesn't do non-standard sizes, yet PDF files don't fit the traditional formatting and have to be fiddled with. I have some other issues to deal with as well that this substitute program seems incapable of doing either.

Working backward, the reason for the stalling on the editing is a matter of frame of mind. I can't just sit down and edit something any old time. It takes a sharp focus without distraction and a lot of patience. In addition to what you'd expect I have to be able to pick up on the voice of the piece and manipulate it where its gone off kilter. The worst part is in not changing the voice as you go through editing. Was there an affect to a character's voice, is there a trait particular to the narrative voice, did I choose to break that rule for a purpose and why. Yes, I break the rules. It's sometimes necessary. It says things about the teller of the story who is never me, but either a passive viewer to the story, or one of the characters in it. Sounds schizophrenic I know, but its no weirder than the characters refusing to do something because they'd rather do something else than what I had in mind. You know, the usual writer craziness.

Trails off...

Mood: pained
Music: Fear is the Key by Iron Maiden and Blue Christmas sung by Porky Pig