I'm BACKKKKKKKK!!! and finding my voice!

And, I am hoping that this is a condition that continues. Absolutely no guarantees in this world where it took me two computers and twenty minutes to get on-line yesterday.

I have finally made friends with my Inspiron. Yes, I did have to restore it to factory settings twice and am holding my breath the external modem keeps working.

I am slowly making friends with my new eyes too. I should say "lens'" as that is really all that is new, after cataract surgery. My left eye seems better and I am adjusted to reading blurred until I can get a script for reading glasses.

Now, to the fun things in life. I am excited about my book again. I have two great editors now. The new one, who is reading it as a brand new reader of the book, is excited about it and has given me some good input. She's as full of ideas as my first editor is. I like to have a reader who is picking the book up blind, with no idea where it is coming from or even what my writing style is. She has never read anything by me before and is looking at it with a clean eye, so to speak. (Yes, I am obssessing on this eye thing a wee bit.)

Both editors have helped me find my voice and say what I want to say in a new and unique way. I had a pottery teacher like that in Casper, Wyoming. He could see through what I was trying to do, right to what I really wanted and needed to do, and lead me in that way.

I had set myself a deadline of March 1st, to get the book out, but it is so much better now and it needs to be "all it can be." Hmmmm, what made me think of that?

Oh, yeah, my grandson/son is graduating from basic training the first of April and we are going to sunny Oklahoma for the ceremony. He phoned today and told me it was 70 degrees one day and they woke up, on their camping trip, to five below, an ice storm and rain. So, how do you pack for that?

I am not actually all that excited about driving thirteen hours but am anxious to give him a hug. The motel has high speed, so I can let let you know what the weather is.

I also need to thank a very special grandson for the funding for this trip.

Why do I need internet when I can't see to read it?

Wow! I don't write for over a month and I gain three followers. Would you guys consider paying me not to write?

My status is about the same. I am online on my old Sony Vaio desktop and my new Dell Inspiron 1545, with external modem, sits at my writing desk unable to go online. AOL neither can help nor care about the situation. The second tech who helped me was most apologetic about not being able to help. The third tech was totally delusional. They ignored my protests that the machine was still unable to connect to AOL and congratulated themselves on a successful session.

My IT nephew tried to help but, I believe we have now figured out it is neither my external modem nor my AOL dial up. I'm rooting for Windows 7 at this time and ready to kick myself for not just installing Windows XP. Remember good old XP? That's the last Windows OS that actually worked. Oh, how I long for the good old days.

I also long for my old eyes. My cataract surgery is complete. Yes, I have 20/20 in my right eye and I can see forever and to the moon with it. The left eye? Not so much. It's barely 20/80 now and I am wearing +300 (I think it is, since I can't see) reading glasses and must sit 8 1/2" from the computer screen. This is difficult when the Inspiron laptop is like 10" wide. The ophthalmologist tells me that it is caused by my lazy left eye. I also understand that complete recovery can take two to four months. I'm not sure I buy that, the lazy eye excuse, but what's done is done. I had my cry just thinking about not being able to paint again, but have moved on now.

I am currently looking for the silver lining in all this.

External modems and internal vision

I feel guilty being even the slightest unhappy with my world, when I have water, food, a roof over my head, and medical care (at least until March 31st). But, it is the only way to let you know I have not abandoned my blog, it has just been a bit hard to get to lately.

You would think that you could plug in a new computer and be good to go, alas, NO!

My faithful Gateway tablet gave up its ghost. I am obsessive about back ups and also got a few hours advanced warning that things were not right, so i did not lose my book or anything, however, my new Dell Inspiron 1545 came complete with OUT a modem.

Okay, you look through the list of stuff you are getting and you notice what they are giving you but nowhere did it say, at least in noticeable letters, you do NOT get an internal modem. I then ordered one and got online quite fine until I went to my Master's Daughter for Christmas and enjoyed WiFi, came home and my Internet would not work.

Yes, I am still on AOL dial-up. It stinks, but it is all I have, so i checked the setting and I was indeed trying to go on dial-up, with my external modem and then I spent an hour, on the phone with Dell. We did so much changing that I could not possibly write down each step just in case and sure enough, just in case happened the next time I went to the library on DSL. And, it did.

So, I am currently on a very old Windows XP desktop, on dial up. Some days I can get on, some days I cannot. I am working on the laptop again but my eyes are complicating all of it.

This is also not the month to fight anything having to do with reading as I am having cataract surgery and, while I now have 20/20 vision in my right eye (a new one for me) I am really struggling to read. Believe me, had I known and if this was elective surgery, I would not have done it. I would rather wear glasses and be able to read easily. But, since cataracts have to go, I did not have a choice.

I am sincerely hoping that tomorrow, after the left eye is done, that things will eventually even out or whatever, at the very least I will get reading glasses, and life will be back to normal; well, as normal as my life ever gets, once i get my laptop working on line.

My new Dell and I are cohabitating.

When the Gateway broke, I was devastated. Since the clips on the swivel screen had broken a year earlier, I was not too surprised but I loved that machine. Then, I used grandson's Gateway with VISTA. Not a good match but I found out that if you force yourself to use it, you can make peace.

My new Dell has Windows 7. We are in discovery mode with each other. I have figured out how to stop my thumb from setting off weird windows. I have also discovered that they make computers without modems now. Yeah, you out there in the boondocks, no modem! Who would have thunk???

It took me about forty minutes on their help phone to get my new external modem to actually work, but here I am back online. Now, the problem is my webpage. It works but I have these HTML errors and I am just not sure how critical that is. I do have several pages left to go.

We spent several days, of the holidays, with my Master's daughter and, guess what? Yep, her computer broke down too but was still under warranty. The bad thing, for me (not for her), was that she lost all her notes on my book. I guess that is for her too as she has promised to go over it again. She is only working three jobs right now, so what the heck???

Hope you all had a good holiday.

The world we live, or read, in.

I love to get transported to a new world, so when I began on my fantasy, I had great fun creating my character's new environment. Today, I read the post, The Importance of World building Uncreated Conscience and was reminded of several of my favorite "new worlds."

Memoirs of a Geisha, Girl With a Pearl Earring, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter are all favorites for me. I think we all tend to enjoy escaping our lives for a good read or movie.

JJ says:

...what makes a work of fiction with great worldbuilding stand out is the
implicit understanding the writer creates about the values of the society in
which the novel is set.

I think this is a major part of world building and is a good place to start building. Without consciously thinking about it being a basis of the world, my whole "what if" idea for Moon Tree Brothers is based on a conversation, or argument actually, wherein it was said that we just had a "difference of opinion in child rearing."

From this grew a world of dragon men, dwarfs and fairies, all dedicated to protecting children, and magical electrical energy that we are depleating by our increasing violence. They work to erase the 'Unknown Darkness' that is affecting the world we live in. They would like to do it without violence, but is that possible?

Write what you are passionate about, even if it is not vampires

In my agent compatibility search, I ran across an interesting post. Agent in the Middle's take of the current market is:

it's become increasingly difficult to sell any genre fiction from a male
protagonist's perspective, unless he's really hot. But even if he's a really hot
teen vampire, it's better to tell the story from a female point of view."

I am no expert. While this is not my first manuscript, it will be the first I am actively pursuing and, early on, I fell into the trap of fretting over every single thing I read.

So, am I going to stop pursuing my male viewpoint fantasy story, sans vampire? No!

You have to write what you feel passionate about and I am passionate about this manuscript.

You have to figure that it can take upwards of two years to get your work out into the buying market. While female vampire stories are the current hot topic, two years from now it is going to be brothers living in a tree, or something you cannot even imagine.

Write from your heart and write with passion.

VISTA, Agents and Tense. Hmm, a correlation?

So, here I sit fighting with VISTA, unable to write as I must type to write. I can hand write notes but my hand is unable to keep up with my brain for anything else. If I were on a desert island, I suppose I would get used to it, but really I am supposed to be sewing a quilt for my grandson for Christmas. But, no, I am screwing up the only computer I can work on.

It had two or possibly five versions of VISTA on it so I go online, find out what to do about it, download a program to fix it. Fix it! HAH! I now have nothing on the computer but five versions of VISTA and AOL. No Word, dang! No Jasc! No, nothing.

So, I go online again and decide this is a time to find possible agents. I decided to start by going down Miss Snark's First Victim blog list of blogging agents. And, guess what I found! I found an agent who has my same "Tense problem." AgentObvious

I have a horrible time with tense. The writer's group, in Wyoming, pointed out my tense issues, my daughter catches it and my grandson catches it and I read it and go, "HUH?"

I finally found out that I catch most of my tense problems, if I keep a book (it has examples of tense) open on my lap, as I edit, and look at it every paragraph, and sometimes sentence, to fix my tense. I really felt like such a horrible writer that I could not just automatically know my tense was off.

I am so reassured. Thank you AgentObvious.