Domestic Analogies. I Can Always Make Them.

Still alive here, and a miracle occurred - I learned how to install fly-front zippers! Part of my problem, it turned out, was that the markings on the pattern were confusing me. Now that everything's clicked, I can ignore them. I also successfully did a new, and more difficult, alteration to the pattern than anything I've done before; something I would have been incapable of doing six months ago, just because I couldn't have focused long enough to do it. So I have four pairs of pants that fit perfectly in the back and almost perfectly in the front - I still have some bugs to work out in fitting the waistband. But even allowing for that and my inability to get all the basting stitches pulled, they're still better than anything I could have gotten at a store. I probably cried less than I would have if I'd gone shopping, too.

None of which, alas, enables me to do what I need to do to start sending queries out again.

The trouble with queries is, that they are the exact opposite of how I need to do things. I can force myself to write them, but I inevitably do them badly. Sometimes, so badly that I wake up in the middle of the night with that excruciating twist in the stomach that says: "Holey cheese that was the worst possible way to do that and it's too late to take it back now."

And other people's advice on how to write them? Is a lot like the markings on the pattern intended to help me install a zipper. Obviously they work for some people - probably most people - and I needed them in order to learn, but they didn't - couldn't - take my alterations into account; and the markings and instructions and diagram laid things out so antithetically to the way I learn things my illegible notes on the instruction sheet say things like "And by left they mean right" and "Line up with the top not the bottom." (That my notes are illegible doesn't matter; making them renders it unnecessary for me ever to refer to them.) I get this in recipes, too. Food doesn't behave the way the recipe says it will, no matter how closely I follow the instructions. So after I've made a dish a few times and start succeeding with it, I ignore the recipe. Level measurement gets me a different result every time, but I make pancakes with scant measures of milk and heaping measurements of baking powder and they're good, low-sodium pancakes, which is what I'm after.

All of which gives me hope that I'm going to get the query thing down eventually, too. The truth is I've never sold anything on a pitch or a query - I've only ever sold on the work, and on personal contact with the editor. And I have no freaking clue how agents work as human beings let alone as professionals. They might as well be aliens, for all I can think my way into their space. It's really, really tempting to send the first X pages with a list of credits and a cover letter that says: "Look, I'm good at writing stories but I suck at selling things. Read the enclosed and if you want to see the rest, let me know. YA, lesbian western, complete, about 70,600 words. Thank you for your time."

For one thing, the agent who doesn't just delete that is probably an agent I could work with.

But that's not how the industry works. So I will just have to keep sending out queries full of excruciatingly wrong things to say like I kept putting in and ripping out zippers, like I kept throwing out pancakes with runny middles, till something clicks and I figure out the point at which the advice givers tell me to go left and I need to turn right.

Publishing Today

Nothing sums up modern publishing like the fact that Lois McMaster Bujold's fourth theological thriller set in the World of Five Gods did not get picked up by the publisher, so she's e-pubbing it herself.

And now I have to cave in and get an e-reader. Because there's not going to be a print run, and Bujold is a read-while-walking, read-while-eating, take-book-to-bed-to-finish-chapter-oh-look-I-finished-and-it's-three-AM author.

Tools

Technology's great, when it works.

I've spent a good chunk of the week troubleshooting the ergonomic keyboard on my non-internet computer. You know, the one I write on?

The symptoms vary every time I turn the computer on. At first all the problems were on the left-hand side - I would type "A" and "A9" would appear, for example; then the left-hand side was fine and half the keys on the right-hand side wouldn't type, and so on. And some of the the troubleshooting steps online sources advised me to take involved typing in commands. And don't talk to me about the way computers assume you'll be able to access the internet when you select the "help" button.

But I finally determined at last that the problem was the keyboard, not the drivers or the ports or any of the other things that might be at fault, so Damon'll pick me up a new keyboard while he's running errands this afternoon, and in the meantime I'm swapping the keyboard on the internet computer back and forth in order to get things done online and on the other computer, which isn't inconvenient at all.

Technology's great, when it works. But this sort of thing makes me sad. Writing is still a relatively low-cost business to be in, requiring less start-up capital than any other enterprise I can think of. But writing professionals are increasingly dependent on technology in order to get any work done. I'm less wired up and technology dependent than anyone I know, but I have to have the keyboard; have to have the internet; have to stop dead, despite my brain working fine, when something goes wrong with my tools.

I could keep writing if all I had was a notebook and a pen, but if I lose access to my tech, I'm dead in the water. I can't sell anything if I can't type, print, share files, and e-mail. No starving in a garret and eking out a living by the pen, or even the typewriter, for a 21st-century freelancer. A base level of affluence is necessary to do the work that connects a story to an audience and an author to payment.

Which sucks. I wonder how much great writing we miss, for lack of universal access to the tools.

A December Miracle

So, Damon and I are late adopters. And I don't mean we wait a year or two before we do an upgrade. I mean we use things until they can't be used anymore and then gripe a lot, because "upgrading" tech sucks. The manufacturers seem to take wicked delight in removing the single most useful feature and replacing it with something we will never, ever use, or rearranging interfaces for no readily apparent reason, so the delete button is where the save button used to be, or in making the new tech just incompatible enough with the products of the old tech that you have trouble accessing your old stuff and - argh. We just hate it.

So when the videocard I was playing Sims2 on went out, we couldn't find an adequate one to replace it that would work with our motherboard and finally Damon said screw it, he was going to get me a new computer and the old one would become mostly his. I felt odd about buying a new computer essentially so I could play a game - my WordPerfect 8 (yes, you read that right) still works fine on the old machine - especially since he's more than once grumbled about the size of it's "footprint" in my life. I mean, sure, I'd miss it, and the online "communities" I've gotten involved in concerning it, but - it's a game. I'd survive. But - possibly because he does grumble about it, but more likely because as soon as I express any guilt or hesitation over the cost of a pleasure he always sets out to convince me that I'm entitled to it - he got stubborn and I've got a new computer. Which is presently internetless and balancing on three TV trays in the game room. The only things on it so far are Windows7, Sims2, and WordPerfect X6, which is a fancy way of saying the 16th version of Word Perfect. In other words, twice as advanced as the one I'm used to.

And I'm still having a few hiccups getting Sims2 set up with all my old stuff (for one thing, no internet means I get to copy all my old files onto a flash drive and walk them across the hall), but my writing stuff made it in one trip and WordPerfect X6 is like a little miracle in a box.

Everything is where it used to be.

New stuff has been added, but I have yet to go looking for anything and find it's been taken away.

A lot of the new stuff is stuff I actually need. Like the ability to hit one button and save as other formats, along with translation from other, often user-hostile formats (yes, I refer to the Devil Program, Word, which I hate with a pure and holy passion so extreme people think I'm joking when I express the true depth of my virulence) without a bunch of hassle. Which is the single problem with my good old WordPerfect 8 - so few people (inexplicably) still use it that I'm always having to translate into .rtf or .txt.

Some of the icons have changed, but not many, and since nothing's been reclassified and the icons still have some visual relationship to their features, and I can still move things around to suit myself, I've yet to be confused.

The old files look exactly the way they used to in the new program - no reformatting, no weird little symbols, no hiccups as the new code for master and subdocuments argues with the old code for master and subdocuments. I just installed it, shifted the files over, set my preferences, and got back to work.

I spend a fair amount of time griping, here, so I thought I'd share my happiness, too. If nothing else, it should give you hope that yes, even in a corporatized, consumerist world in which individual choice is limited by the markets, sometimes you can get what you want even when you didn't know you wanted it.

We should hold out for that more, and accept being sold to, less.

If I Don't Respond

This is just to say, we had a blue screen of death for no readily discernible reason last night and since we don't know why it happened, we don't know it won't happen again.

So if you try to contact us in the next couple of days and hear nothing, and don't see us around the net, it's probably technical difficulties, not unsociality.

Though we are occasionally unsocial, too.

Migratory Bird Day is Saturday. Grab some binoculars and go find out what your local Audubon is planning!

This has been a Public Service Announcement.

The Joy of Nitpicking

So I'm reading for the Andre Norton award (and I'm not going to get them all read), and I'm on China Mieville's Railsea, and though I'm having no difficulty getting through the story I'm having a couple of problems with it. The relevant one at the moment is in buying into the premise, which is (roughly) a vast sea of intertwining railroad tracks "sailed" by trains fulfilling all the functions of ships - pirates, navy, merchants, and "molers," who hunt the gigantic burrowing animals that tunnel, hunt, and breach through the ground below the rails, which is qualitatively different in some undefined way from the "hardlands" on which people actually live. For the sake of the story I can deal with that, but it keeps bugging me that burrowing animals like the great southern moldywarp, apparently analogous to sperm whales (since one of them is standing in for Moby Dick) breach all over the place and leave molehills and have room to live and hunt without breaking the tracks.

So far the whole business of track maintenance is handwaved by references to "angels," mysterious trains that no one ever more than glimpses that fix tracks when no one is looking; but even if we grant that (and I am hoping that some information that makes it less handwavey comes along in the second half of the book), it should be common, in a great moldywarp hunt, for one to come up under the tracks and wreck them and the trains on them. They must come up very close to them, or the molers couldn't pursue them in their jollytrains, since the dirt itself is much too dangerous to get onto. Even if the moldywarp takes damage in the process, the tactic should be worthwhile, as breaking the track before the train can shunt (another point handwaved a lot), and in particular breaking a bunch of related tracks near their point of intersection, would cause the train to derail and turn the molers from hunters into prey.

This point alone is enough to keep me from voting for this book, especially in the stiffness of this year's competition.

Coincidentally, gaming group e-mail this morning contains a message, from my husband, discussing discrepancies in the description of a kind of magical construct we recently dealt with and the information describing how to construct it. We were going to sell the remnants as scrap metal, but with these discrepancies we have no idea how much of the scrap metal we have. The problem should be familiar to most gamers, "D&D economics" having plagued the simulationist end of the player spectrum since the infancy of role-playing games.

Hand-waving this sort of thing by saying "It's only a game/story" or "It's magic" or "Just roll with it" is common, but it is not adequate. Science fiction and fantasy, whatever the medium, attracts a large number of people who actively enjoy figuring out how things work - engineers, programmers, actual scientists. Not just at the physical end, either. Practitioners and enthusiasts of the soft sciences and the arts like to see linguistics and cultures that work. An artist who makes kinetic sculptures is as likely to be a nitpicker on a mechanical point as an engineer, because the jobs overlap.

Okay, there's a point of diminishing returns in worrying about fiddly details; but a lot of people give up long before that. And yes, a big chunk of the audience doesn't care. But those who do, care a lot. Disrespecting this more demanding segment of the audience seems counterproductive to me, as they are also the most loyal and dedicated audience one could ask for.

The most effective tactic, I have found, for the creator who doesn't have the expertise or patience to work out the details of how some essential part of his vision would work in the real world, is to subcontract the labor. A wise DM who has a geologist continually criticizing his dungeons will make talking to this person a routine part of his planning. "You know what would be cool? An obsidian dungeon with a big lake in the middle with a whole lost civilization of giant kobolds. But I don't know how that would come about, and wouldn't the tunnels be too slick to walk in?" Next thing you know, the player's drawing diagrams and talking about water tables and lava tubes and suddenly you have A Better Idea, and you put the dungeon together and instead of constantly having to interrupt the game to answer this guy's objections on the fly, he's eagerly pushing the rest of the party through a much more improbable scenario than you would ever have come up with on your own. Reduced labor and stress for you, increased fun for him, everybody wins.

Alternatively, for those of us working for larger audiences, identify the least plausible part of your vision, and attack it head on. Research the stuffings out of it and find a way to show it working, vividly and immediately. Make all the visible detail convincing enough, plausible enough, ordinary enough, and most of all consistent enough, and the audience will take the parts you don't show on faith, or work them out for themselves. Fandom is full of people producing starship schematics from hints collected throughout the lifetime of a series, resolving minor discrepancies, and having a blast doing it.

This advice is most applicable for fantasists, but it applies in the mainstream, too. How many TV shows have thrown you right out of the plot by their reliance on magical computers, inaccurate history, absurd biology, or impossible physics? If you like a genre or a show enough otherwise you'll willingly suspend your belief by its neck until it's dead, if necessary, but the creators need to make that as easy and fun as possible for you. If it's more work than fun to believe in a situation, the audience won't do it.

Besides, the Better Idea tends to lurk like a moldywarp under layers of lazy imagery. Digging down to them is well worthwhile.

First, Catch Your Rabbit

Supposedly there's an old cookbook somewhere that starts the recipe for rabbit stew with the instruction: "First, catch a rabbit." I'm pretty sure it's not true, but I'm a big fan of it as creative advice, particularly for people who intend to publish. You can't publish what you don't have, though it's astonishing how many people try. It's arguable that the serial format enables people to succeed, too, but that's a whole post on its own.

I have recently exhorted people to stop putting off what they want to do until they get the tools they want and just go do it. I have also recently said that if you need a necessary tool you will find a way to get it. This probably sounds contradictory to some of you out there who feel toolless, but it's not. That some tools are harder to get than others doesn't make them any less necessary to achieving the goal, and a tool that is necessary to finish a job is probably not necessary to begin it. The only tools you absolutely, positively cannot start without are the ones you own yourself. Brains. Will. Skill and the capacity to acquire skill.

The skilled, professional workman has a wide assortment of tools, well-maintained and suited to the work he does, always at hand; but it's a rare workman indeed who always has all of them. I know my medium - the English language - well enough that I seldom have to use the tools I have handy to fine-tune it, but when I need them I have multiple dictionaries, a thesaurus, The Elements of Style (I thought I had the Chicago Manual of Style, too, but it looks like I don't and I haven't needed it since college anyway), and so on, along with baby name books, guides to formats, atlases, books of quotations, references on dialect, etc., right on the desk. Plus the internet, but the books (like my brain) keep right on working during power outages and equipment failures, and their formats never become obsolete and unsupported, so I like them.

The Forteana and folklore shelves are also adjacent to the desk, as is a Peterson field guide since I'm more likely to need to refer to and describe a bird than any other non-pet animal. Resources specific to a project also cluster around the desk during active work on the project. Work on Len involved a binder full of photocopied material, including the 1866 Texas Almanac; timelines; reference books about the Civil War, Texas, horses, guns, clothing, slavery, folk remedies, the chemical qualities of plants, and a dozen other things, and that wasn't half as reference-intensive as 11,000 Years Lost.

A change in medium requires adding to the toolkit. This can be a shock to someone who's used to being skilled, which is why my grades in German, French, and Spanish were always lower for written than for spoken work, back in the day. Conversation in one language is much like conversation in another - full of hesitations, gestures, and plunging ahead to make oneself understood in defiance of logic and grammar. When I wrote, however, I couldn't wrap my head around the necessity to dial back on what I tried to communicate and consistently tried to write in an unfamiliar language as complexly and fluidly as I wrote in English, when my grasp of grammar and syntax in the new language were not up to the task.

There is no shame in having to dial back like this. It can even be exciting to realize how much you have to learn. E.B. Lewis, whose keynote at the recent Austin SCBWI conference I quoted recently, talked at some length about how, when he started looking at picture books after establishing himself in the fine arts, he realized he had to learn a whole new visual language, and it was clear to me that the thrill of mastering this language was part of his motivation for expanding into illustration. His fine arts education background gave him a leg up on articulating and regulating what he needed to do; but it was no substitute for learning that language.

Whether learning a brand new skill or expanding into a new medium, it's a good idea to lay out your toolkit and identify the tools that are missing; but you can start work with what you've got. My normal practice when I know I need a lot of research to tell a story is to read everything I can lay hands on related to the topic, knowing that the plot will emerge naturally if I feed my backbrain and give it time to work.

When I started work on Widespot, though, the research I had to do was not related to the story at all. I needed mechanical game knowledge, cheat codes, and mods - hacks, really, but the term "hack" has a whiff of the illegitimate, and what I needed was not a way to avoid mastering the game but a way to manipulate it in order to set up the storylines I wanted to place before my audience without making neighborhood-corrupting mistakes. This required a certain amount of research, experimentation, and downloading, then learning to use what I downloaded, before I could even open the game with Widespot in mind. This took time, and did not feel like creating at all.

So creation of Widespot began where story creation always begins - between my ears, and in the current notebook. A lot of people use computer journaling or their phone these days, but I'm a big fan of hard copy, as I said above. The first notes for Widespot don't look very different from my first notes for a novel, either. A lot of lists, for character roles and story elements. Lots of question marks. A mapping of the boundaries.

Being wiser than I was when taking German, French, and Spanish, I confronted my limitations early on. Although I'd been playing the game for over a year, and felt I'd done pretty well blundering along like a bull in a china shop learning as I went, the necessity to please an audience rather than just myself required that I dial back on what I wanted to do. I needed to keep it simple. To make an engaging, drama-rich neighborhood with the minimum number of characters, buildings, cheats, and modifications I could manage. The simpler I made the job, the more likely I was to do it right.

Considering an audience beyond oneself changes the whole ballgame. In this case, to maximize the audience, I wanted to make a Base Game only neighborhood,as the expansion packs are not backward compatible. A neighborhood built with the Apartment Life engine would not work for a user whose game installation included only the base game and University expansions, whether I put apartments into the neighborhood or not. Similarly, if I dressed my characters in clothing created by a fan, it would be replaced with a random outfit for a player who did not have that piece of clothing in her own Downloads folder; moreover, I would be morally and legally obliged to ask that creator's permission to use that item, just as I am if quoting someone else's poem in a story. (It is a common misconception that it's okay to use other people's stuff without credit in a public context if there's no money involved. Intellectual property rights among the fan base is another topic too big to digress onto right now, so just trust me on this for now.)

This meant that I not only had to get technical help to take my full installation and keep it from creating an all EP neighborhood, but that I wouldn't have all the story elements I was accustomed to dealing with when playing the game. Base game characters had all the personality statistics and skills I was used to, but the choice of Aspirations (the trait determining what the sim wants out of life) was more limited, as one was added in the third expansion. Base game sims have memories and interests, but no hobbies or inventory of items they can carry around; they have relationship scores but no mechanic for determining romantic attraction; they can visit community lots and invite people over but they cannot go on dates; they can get a limited number of careers, paint pictures to sell, and play the piano for tips, but they cannot work in retail stores, open their own businesses, throw pots, or play any instrument except the piano. Base Game neighborhoods have no weather and their plants don't grow. You can design individual sims with varied faces and dress them in different clothes, but the number of hairstyles, base facial templates, and outfits available is (as I quickly found) stultifyingly narrow, especially since hairstyle and clothing choices are important parts of characterization in a visual medium.

So, like a painter accustomed to working in oils and mixing his own paints suddenly being restricted to a four-color palette controlled by hex code, I had to retrench and scale back my expectations, at least to start. But the thing about limitations is, that they're a challenge. And challenges are fun to overcome.

All right, so I only had five aspirations instead of the usual six. What could I do with those five? What if I make five households, each dominated by the values of one aspiration (though I needn't make every member conform)? The Family household would have lots of kids, of course; the Popularity household should be well-connected; the Fortune household should be filthy rich and it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife and I don't have all the romantic mechanics that were added in the Nightlife expansion but base game jealousy works just like it does in the full game, with sims being jealous on behalf of their relatives - what if every household in the neighborhood has a member looking to marry into the Fortune household?

And off I go. If you've read any of the Garage Sales, you know how it works from there - for me. I always, always, start with text on a page, analysis and organization segueing into inspiration and some finished work or other - game, blog post, novel, vocal presentation, doesn't matter. My rabbit can only be caught this way.

But what about your rabbit? How do you make the transition from that bright shining idea in your head to a work existing in the objective, material universe where the audience can get at it? Do you need to sketch? To walk through the action? To set up 3-D models? To pick out a few notes on an instrument?

Once you know how to open that connection between the interior of your brain to the exterior world, you will find you always have the tools on hand. I can write notes on the backs of receipts in blunt pencil, if I have to. You may prefer a piano but if nothing else you can hum; you may prefer to model shapes out of clay, but in a pinch bubblegum and duct tape will do you to start. The nature of that starting point is such that the only way for you to lose it is to lose control of the body part through which it manifests, which is in the category of pathology and beyond my current scope.

Get yourself through that starting point, and you'll find that the internal pressure to get the other tools you need to accomplish the purpose drives you right along.

The Secret of Life in a Nutshell

Goodness, what a short week! But I've gotten two queries out, should have a new pair of slacks that fit by this evening, and made some progress putting together the necessary submission package to make Widespot available for download at the hosting sight where I'd like to see it, and where it's most likely to find its proper audience.

Queries I've griped about before. One afternoon of sewing resulted in successful installation of a single zipper. And the submission process for the hosting site is proving to be one big learning curve, as it involves fitting a lot of information into a maximum of 15 .jpg files and one .png - and we don't have Photoshop. The minimalistic photo editor we do have is not great at producing montages, which is the only way to fit all the information into the space.

And once again I am struck by the unity of experience. Whatever you want to do in this world, you either go out and get the skills and tools necessary to do it, or you decide you don't want it that much and do without. Slacks that fit, books in print, a round-the-world trip in your own yacht, it's all the same basic process.

This is the advantage of the mature brain, this recognition of underlying unity and the knowledge that you have the skill of acquiring skills. If, in fact, you used your youthful flexibility of brain to learn how to learn. If you didn't, you're in a bind. Learning gets physically harder as we get older, unless we've been learning right along and didn't let the ruts dig in too deeply.

Odds are poor that I will ever be good at translating two dimensional figures into three dimensions at this point, and therefore zippers will remain difficult. The synapses that would have been necessary are no longer available, probably occupied by an axiom of story logic. But the skill of making notes to myself, of puzzling out instructions, of patiently ripping out mistakes and trying again - yeah, I've got that. I don't have Photoshop, but I have PhotoScape and the will to experiment and the capacity to judge a point of diminishing returns in an endeavor.

You know how to tell what you really want?

Look at how much time you spend working on getting it.

Slacks that fit. Access to the correct audience. I will get them. If not one way, then another.

That Time of Year Again; or Why Am I Never Prepared for What Always Happens??

As Kitchen Sanitation Month draws to a close, I am faced with the reality that I still don't understand how the crisper drawers in my refrigerator are set up.

It looks perfectly simple when I'm taking it apart for cleaning, and then when I go to put it back not one bit of it makes any sense. The only thing I know for certain is that the holes on the sides of the frame fit into those little knobs on the sides of the refrigerator. That's the baseline. But once the frame's back in place - this part moves this way so this end must be the front, but if I try to put it in that way the glass won't lie flat and if I put it in the other way there's nothing to hook the ends into and the slots on the sides of the drawers should lock into something but there's nothing except this bit and in that case how does the drawer move at all? Every year I go through this. Every single year.

It's not just that I'm mechanically hopeless. Damon's much better at this sort of thing than I am, and when I enlist his aid he's soon as bewildered as I am. At the moment we have an arrangement that almost works, but one of the drawers sticks so much that we can tell something's still off. I'm hoping that, having gotten so close and slept on it, I can get to the "oh, of course, I do this to that and then everything fits" moment, which is also a yearly occurrence, as soon as I go down there and look. You'd think it'd get easier every year, but it seems to get harder.

This, of course, is what notes are for. Maybe this is the year we make some. But will we then be able to find them next time Kitchen Sanitation Month rolls around? All we can do is the best we can do, but I'm not convinced we've done our best on this one.

I'm sure nobody who reads this blog ever has problems like this. :)

It's just a devil program...

...with evil on its mind...

So. If anybody out there reading this actually uses Word (as opposed to used by it), and is comfortable with it to the point of being able to make it do what you want even when what you want it to do is outside what the original programmers assumed you'd want - where should I look in Microsoft Word 2010 in order to figure out how to enable bookmarking the .doc I'm editing in compatibility mode? Because I can go to the screen where you create bookmarks, and it'll let me type stuff in, but it won't give me any options except "close."

I'm not asking you to solve my problem. I'll never master this hellspawn if other people solve my problems and in any case you can't see what I did. Just point me in the right direction, that's all I ask.

A friend of mine, when I was running around trying to figure out what format I should use for scanning, said she envisioned me typing it all in and revising and having it ready in about ten years. And it's true that as long as I'm going through it taking out all the line breaks in the middles of lines and the places where the text got rearranged or the scanner read a capital I as a 1, I'm tweaking it a bit.

Who wouldn't?

Hurray!

Asking questions didn't help, and googling didn't help directly, but googling and following a link and then following another link and then following another link, did.

The problem: I do not now, nor have I ever had, a Word document for the books to which I hold the reverted rights. Every single piece of advice I've been able to get has assumed the Word document, as if there aren't any other word processing programs out there, and as if Word weren't the worst word processing program ever invented (this from someone whose first word processor was built into a typewriter). So I knew I had to scan the books, but the question was, What's the easiest format to scan them to for all the subsequent conversions they'll have to go through as I try to make them as painless for people to buy as possible?

The search led me down many fruitless by-ways until I landed on the blog of someone I never heard of, who talks about a lot of things irrelevant to me, but who also has dug down to the source code and told me where I need to start and how to get from there to the starting line.

And, not to keep you in suspense any longer, the answer is "Scan it as a .txt file" and then there's a tutorial on how to turn that into a .doc file. Just .doc, not .docx, which I believe is now the devil program's default format, so if you've been using that program and still couldn't get to the starting line, maybe that's the deal.

It's way too late to start on a project that tedious right now, so I'll do a quick whip round on the housework (and by quick I mean cursory, because it's triple digits again today, folks, and I still only have air in the study and the bedroom, which can't both be run at once) and tomorrow I'll get into that temp-job state of mind - put a dress on, have breakfast, and settle down to a tedious task that at least I won't have to do tomorrow, trouble-shooting further problems as I go. I'm good at that, though I haven't temped in over ten years now and my skills are rusty. But if I can get properly into the mindset, the study will be much tidier at the end of the day tomorrow than it is right now.

Research, and then there's research

I told the gaming group the Chinese baby story, and one of the players said that newborn baby boys have a street value in China because of their being so strongly preferred to girls. Which ramps the whole affair up in the "thriller" scale, if true, but wasn't mentioned in the news stories I read.

This is why you should research before you start writing. You don't want to do a lot of work, then do some research to fill in the blanks, and learn something that changes the whole face of your premise. God, the devil, and the best stories are all hanging out together in the details you dig out by researching.

Unfortunately, business research is less fun than story research. I'm supposed to be figuring out how to take the backlist books to which I have recovered rights, and learning how to make e-books of them. If electronic copies of these exist at all, they're on floppies in outdated versions of WordPerfect. So I'll have to scan the books, but I don't even know what the best format to scan them into is. So I'm asking people who've done it before, and so far not quite getting answers to the questions I thought I was asking, which means I'll have to do interpretive reading to discover if the answer I need are nevertheless in there.

Which is standard research procedure, but I keep finding more urgent things to do. You know how it is.

I don't even have an e-reader. I like hard copies. But if I can generate income from e-books, I'll have to learn to like them, too.

Technical Difficulties

Yes, I know that picture doesn't show. I can't fix it, or add the tags, because Blogspot won't let me use my "Edit Posts" function. When my issue gets fixed, I'll fix the image. Meantime, in the unlikely event that anybody's panting to see my game piece, I've put several pictures of him, and the girls, in the picture forum on the Mod the Sims Discussion Board, and they can be easily found by clicking my name, going to my profile, and finding my recent posts.

Good thing it wasn't anything more important, or this would be much more frustrating. Not that I ever have important pictures to post. One of these days I'll have to carve out some room in the budget for a digital camera, so I can enliven my blog with visuals more often. But there always seems to be a book, or some fabric, or a repair, or a cause, that seems more urgent.

Since I don't know what the technical difficulties are, I can't promise they won't spread. If I go quiet for a few days, assume it's Blogspot's fault, not that I was in a car wreck.

"Upgrades" Suck

I just thought I'd mention that.

Three weeks after the hard drive crash, which apparently coincided with the death of the DVD head in our CD-DVD drive, we're finally almost at full functionality. Did you know that external DVD drives are "in" and internal ones "out?" But Damon says we don't have any more room for peripherals on our desk, so we mail-ordered. Which means I'm still several days away from completely reinstalling my Sims2 game; but fortunately everything else we need was either on a CD or downloadable in an .exe file.

However, ever since we restored the data from backup, we can't send e-mail. We can receive it, in one of the three different e-mail folders Outlook 2010 constructed for us even though we didn't ask it to, but no matter where or how we try to compose outgoing messages, it insists on putting them into the outbox subfolder of a different one and then tells us it can't send any of them because it can't read the data file. Which data file, it won't say. I'd think it was the restored one, given the timing, but we can read all of that stuff, and in any case outgoing e-mail shouldn't have anything to do with our archive.

Microsoft can send an automated test message using our account, so it has to be possible, but as for letting us know how it works so we can figure out where the problem is - pfft, we're just the user.

And I can't penetrate the layers of security protecting Microsoft's "customer service" personnel from contact with a customer. The websites of course only cover the most basic problems encountered by the computer illiterate, I can't e-mail them, and following the links that promise me a phone number just leads me around in a circle to someplace where I've been unsuccessful before, without a glimmer of actual contact information.

Anybody got an idea?

Or a recommendation for non-Microsoft e-mail browsers? Because I'm really disinclined to deal with them at any level. We only have the latest version of Office installed because some publishers (being hopelessly whipped into submission by our corporate masters) will only accept files in that format. Which is no picnic to translate from our perfectly-functioning WordPerfect8 program, let me tell you; but I'd rather deal with that occasionally than use Word, aka THE WORST WORD PROCESSING PROGRAM EVER MADE. But that's another rant.

I'm going to go weed now. Weeds never upgrade.