I ordered a Magic Mouse from Apple (after calling both Mac suppliers in my area and learning they will not stock it for whatever reason), and it arrived today.

There was a little drama when the FedEx truck drove past my house like a huge tease, and I considered sitting on the roof with a crossbow to shoot out their tires when they came by again, but I realize that was a bit extreme. They eventually did bring my mouse.

I followed the instructions to pair it with Bambi, it started mousing and I unplugged my USB mouse...

My Magic Mouse didn't magic.

At which point I looked at the system requirements and realized it wanted the upgrade OSX, Snow Leopard, and I had decided not to buy that -- yet, at least. That noise you heard was my crying. But then I looked again! And it said I could have regular Leopard! I just needed this update.

I asked Bambi to update. She said there were no updates available. What do you mean there are no updates? The mouse says I need one!!!

Then I did what amberdine would do. (She is my Mac enabler. She converted me, told me about Adium and Scrivener, and the mouse.) I looked at the Apple website, went to support and updates for wireless keyboards and mice... and lo, there was my update.

My mouse, she is wireless and touchable. I'm trying to remember how fast I had the tracking on the USB mouse, because I'm having trouble getting used to this one, but it'll click eventually.

I'm already in love with the scrolling. No little places for fur or dust to get caught in! (Which is what happened to my Mighty Mouse that came with Bambi; I couldn't scroll up anymore.) The only thing I really miss about the other mouse is the expose all button with the ball, but I suppose I can get used to pressing the keyboard button for that. Well, and sometimes I leave my hand on the mouse and the scrolling starts, whether or not I want it.

Here it is posing with a sock in progress.



--

In other news, Stewie is no longer attempting to assassinate the babies. He follows them closely, and they are cautious, but the only fights have been controlled; Todd defends himself pretty well, and Bobby just avoids confrontation. I have hope they will be able to tolerate living together soon, even if they're never BFFs.

Last week, I finished going over a draft of THREEFOLD BLIGHT. The beginning didn't change too much, but I did major overhauls on the end, as I've mentioned. I combined a couple scenes, moved things around, and tried to make everything sharper and cleaner.

I cut about 9,000 words. The manuscript went from 86k to 77k. Part of this was the work I did as I mentioned above. Part of it was simply cleaning the prose. And then, starting last night, I've been having Bambi the iMac reading to me (again) and snipping words as I go. Scaffolding, typos, and stuff I thought was necessary but wasn't. I've cut another thousand words so far.

My goal is to get it down to 75k. (Aside from it being a nice wordcount for YA, it's a completely arbitrary goal. Mostly, I wanted to see if I could cut over 10k from a manuscript I already thought was pretty tightly written. It turns out I can.) I know I can cut another 500 words in the remaining third. I can probably cut more. This is after a draft in which I agonized over every sentence, chopping gleefully.

Things I've been cutting:

a little
a moment
a heartbeat
anyway
almost
mostly
seem
probably
really

I'd already gotten pretty good about not letting adverbs, extra "that"s, and "had"s into my first drafts, but the same can't be said for brief amounts of time or extra qualifiers. Darnit, don't let something SEEM like it's a fact. Let it be a fact!

I also took out descriptions that didn't add anything. (There was one I did a ton of research for, then spent about an hour figuring out the perfect way for these two sentences to appear. Yeah, they're gone now.) Even just a few redundant adjectives add up.

I cut explainy bits and let the reader figure it out. If there needed to be an explainy bit, I trimmed it down to its real purpose, rather than bury it in pointless descriptions and prose. Explain and move on.

I replaced things that took five words with things that took one word. Hazy near-darkness? Gloom, baby. That's gloom.

The draft is already so much stronger. The prose is tighter and easier to read, and I haven't even come close to sacrificing voice, rhythm, or tone.

--

One side effect I hadn't anticipated: for about thirty minutes after listening to the computer read, I thought I was losing my mind. All my thoughts were in the computer voice. Furthermore, I began feeling the computer was quietly snarking me, judging my writing powers while it read. It dragged out words like "stupid", giving the U an extra edge.

My computer is mocking me.

Deluge
Unwater
Tsunami
Maelstrom
Floodgate

Storm Surge Cycle

--

*licks titles*

(Now no one else will want them.)

Deluge is written. Unwater is...premised and cooking in my backbrain. Tsunami has leviathans and underwater cities. Um, no idea what the other two are about, but I like them. And I'd better not look up any more nouns (or unnouns) just in case more leap into my brain. I liked Tide, but two people immediately thought of laundry. One less book I have to write. :P

Titles have never been this pushy with me. I'm not quite sure what to do with all this except take some notes and hope I get to write them some day.

All I wanted was something to call the Deluge/Unwater folder. :S

--

PS. Hay bales are gone. Hard drive works. Harpy didn't fix itself while I was looking away. 2/3 is not bad.

1. Trailer with giant bales of hay is still out there. Was cute the first day. Was cute the second day. Pushing it by the third day. Six days is not funny anymore.

Mister hay trailer person, please fix your tire and go away.

2. Obama is speaking at JMU (in Harrisonburg, by where I live). I had to go by JMU to get to the grocery store today.

Traffic. Is. Nuts.

It's not as bad as it could be, but seriously, there are cops everywhere. Not even just by JMU.

3. I ordered an external hard drive for Bambi the iMac to use for Time Machine. It came FexEx today. Hurrah! Right?

I opened the rather large box to find the smaller box with my hard drive in there, an invoice, a tiny catalogue...and that was it. Notice something missing? Like, say, padding for my expensive hard drive???

Worried it became damaged during transport, I opted not to open the hard drive and test it yet, but to call the company and ask if they could assure me they'd replace it (with no fees on my part! I didn't do this!) if it didn't work. I looked at the invoice...no phone number. ARGH. There was a help site. I went to that, filled out the form, and they flashed a message that said a confirmation email would appear in five minutes. Fast forward five minutes, no confirmation email. Twenty minutes. Still no confirmation.

I tried again, using a different email address. Several hours later, no response to either message. I'd worry less, except their website says you only have 14 days to return things, and that's from the day they shipped it, not when you received it. Since they sent it FedEx ground...well, I'm in a bit of a hurry.

If I don't have an email tomorrow, I'm calling Amazon (I ordered it through Amazon, but a dealer got my money - I'm not sure how it works), and I'm asking them to fix it. I assume they'll want to, since they trusted this company. And since I'm in such a cross mood...I hope someone tells me I can try my hard drive without worrying I'm going to risk having to buy another one because of their stupid error.

I hope I'm not feeling this cross tomorrow, but comma help them if I am. You don't mess with what's supposed to be my backup drive. Writers iz nutz, and backups...they're important.

4. Several very odd things in the slush today. Very odd behavior from people. I will have full reports of the oddness on Saturday.

5. In good news (or at least less grumpy news), I got quite a bit of work on DELUGE done, and I'm feeling really good about the book. It's UF(ish), therefore commercial, but it's still got stuff I love about secondworld fantasy. It was hard to write, really hard, and even reading through it, I don't recognize some of the elements as being from my story. I remember writing them, so I must have done it.

(I also remember desperately trying to avoid writing some of them, and dragging the hard scenes out of my head word. by. painful. word. The people who read the book said they're the strongest scenes in the book, though, so and I hope they're right. I don't want to have to rip those scenes up and try again. Very emotionally taxing. I'll fix what I need to, but whitepaper those bits. *shudder*. *SHUDDER.*)

Dear Windows Update:

I hate you.

Grr,

Jodi

PS. Crashing the computer while you shut down to update? Extra uncool.

PPS. Furthermore, shutting down while I'm away from the computer and can't stop you? Argh. And you know what else? At least if you're going to shut my computer down, save my document. Actually, there's no reason for an entire chapter to be without the edits I put in tonight. I'm a compulsive saver. So what happened to all my ctrl-s-ing? Did you just...decide not to, once you shut down? Yes, I realize there was a "recovered" document with my edits, and yay for that, but I did save the document to begin with. Not that you care!

PPPS. Next new computer? Totally going to be a Mac.

Reviews: The Isis Knot: 1 - some page near the end. Through chapter 25. To make Chester the Computer happy, I had to move the file to WordPad, which doesn't seem to believe in page numbers.

Prayer: Father, please be with J and his family, S and her family, and K.

Ferret Adventures: Stewie wants my sock knitting needles. He thinks he's being stealthy, but really, climbing up on me and going immediately to grab the nearest needle? Not so stealthy.

Kippy Adventures: I think she was fighting something on the other side of the closed window. The blinds kept flapping, and she was tapping the glass a bunch. I'm sure she scared a bug to death or something.

--

Occasionally I get documents that Chester the Computer doesn't like. They open just fine, but when the window is open, the fan runs on super high mode. It stops when I minimize the window. I have no idea why it does this, or what makes it happen, but let me tell you, it's really unnerving to have your computer sound like it's about ready to take off.

When it isn't too bad, I put up with it, but tonight I could feel the fan through the floor. I tried changing the file name, copy and pasting the story into a new document, and neither helped. Eventually I sucked it up and moved it onto WordPad, and that worked. No more zoom computer. But no highlight button, no page numbers, no page breaks, really. My reviewing system is all out of wack when this stuff happens. It's worth it to read good stories, though. *endures* *overcomes*

Got a bunch read. I can finish it after I've recharged my brain for a few hours, read the next novel, and some pages, and then I am freeeeee to revise. (For now. If another manuscript shows up in my inbox, my very powerful sense of guilt will make me read it.)

I must sleep or my brain will melt into mush. I'm off to think about nothing more complicated than the silliness of ferrets, and the bossiness of Kippy.