The Daily Report

I mentioned last week that there’s an updated version of Word for the Android OS. I’ve been spending most of today getting acquainted with it. The new version is both more powerful than the previous iteration, and closer to the desktop.

I have to say that while Word remains better than Google Docs for tricky formatting and preparing things to ebook specifications and is loads better for dealing with big and complicated documents, GDocs remains the gold standard for fluid multi-device, cross-platform jumping. I’ve learned that OneDrive still doesn’t like it if I start something in one place and then open it in another without first closing it in the first place. It can cope. It’s just not happy.

So, I’m not going to be switching from Docs to Word for free-wheeling creative writing, but this is still good news for my projects that rely on elaborate formatting and precise presentation of information. It’s still not necessarily a place to do the heavy lifting on those projects, if only because the lack of a mouse and keyboard shortcuts makes formatting a lot less seamless, but perhaps I can do something with templates.

The State of the Me

Had a decent weekend, sleep-wise.

Plans For Today

The remaining couple of hours of the day are going to be spent creatively brainstorming for this week’s MU chapter, as I try to step back into a more formal writing process. Tomorrow I’m going to start writing the “seed” of the story, Wednesday I’m going to try to flesh it out, and Thursday I’m going to work on finishing it, giving me Friday to polish or add in any fresh insights.

The Daily Report

Well, one unexpected piece of good news yesterday: I learned Microsoft recently came out with an actual Word app for Android devices. Their previous Office suite could open, view, edit, and create Word docs, but it was basically a glorified rich text editor. While I wouldn’t want to try to do heavy formatting on my phone to begin with, the fact that there was no access to Word’s styles system meant that any work done on the phone that went beyond simple text entry would have to be re-worked quite a bit to integrate it with anything done on a desktop. I haven’t tested it extensively, but it seems like for most purposes work done on an Android device is now exactly the same as work done in the actual Word program.

So, now I’m going to have to take a look at all the projects I started and then didn’t find the time and/or continued interest for because I couldn’t juggle them between devices, and figure out what to do with this new information.

The State of the Me

Was a bit wired last night, but did sleep well once I did get to sleep.

Plans For Today

Last Friday was my first new chapter after a long slump. Today’s just as important, in my mind, as one chapter doesn’t break a slump. I’ve been doing some pretty decent writing all week. Not all stuff that connects to anything, but writing nonetheless. I’m pretty confident that I can build on last week and keep going.

The Daily Report

Blue Author needs a larger, more reliable revenue stream badly.

So, later today, I’m going to be posting more of John Z. Upjohn’s book, The Freedom of Liberty, ending with prominent links to my Patreon account and a PayPal tip jar. Further installments of this rollicking, good ol’-fashioned military-tinged space opera adventure story will follow on most subsequent Wednesdays, as long as it’s worth my time to keep doing so. If I can find a suitably appreciative audience here, I’ll keep posting them here. If not, I’ll post them as locked entries on my Patreon account.

What’s the benchmark? Well, I don’t have a specific one in mind for free-floating tips, but if my Patreon funding hits $500 a month (it’s at $418 and change right now) then I’ll keep posting them where the public can read them.

Basically, I’m at a point right now where my satirical writing has attracted a lot of positive notice, but not much of anything in the way of money. I’d like to develop the Upjohn idea into a book or books, but I can’t justify spending the time pursuing it at a time when I’m scraping by.

The State of the Me

As we go into the tail-end of July, I’ve had some temperature-related difficulties. Monday afternoon it actually got too hot to work inside my office, and the past couple nights have been awkward for sleeping. Well, I have a quality laptop. It’s not good for the publishing/editing/formatting stuff, but I can write and post from it.

Plans For Today

I’m planning on getting out of the office to do some random writing in a different location in the early afternoon, and then come back and post the next bit of The Freedom of Liberty, as mentioned previously. I’m going to close out the day by doing some preliminary writing on this week’s MU chapter.

The Daily Report

A while ago, I lowered the cost of the MU Omnibus e-books to a flat 4.99 each, instead of prices that roughly correlated to their lengths. This was to test the theory that this would produce a jolt in their sales. Well, the sales not only didn’t increase, but they decreased, even though this experiment encompassed periods when my profile was higher than normal. I suppose this supports the “price equals perceived value” theory… they looked like a better product when they were a worse buy.

For the next phase of the experiment, I’m going to be putting them at a higher flat price: 9.99. People have told me for years I don’t value my own work highly enough, and while I’m not sure that “price” and “value” are the same thing, my whole thing has been that whatever price point generates the most revenue for the artist is the best valuation. (In cases where revenue remains constant as price decreases, I’d say go with the lower price because that’s more readers, and readers == future revenue for other streams.)

Today is the day I intend to renew posting Tales of MU chapters. I can’t say I’m 100% happy with where the next chapter is, but I also can’t say that’s 100% not jitters. There’s a kind of stage fright that comes over me sometimes when it comes to sharing my work, and the longer I go without really doing it, the worse it gets. I think I have this feeling like the next chapter has to be absolutely dynamite in order to “justify” the delay, but the facts are that we’re just not at a dynamite place in the story, and the delay isn’t something that’s justified or not, it’s something that’s happened.

The State of the Me

My sleep schedule’s really been messed up lately, mostly by personal stuff. I think I got it back on track today by going to bed early last night. The trick is going to be maintaining some discipline over it over the weekend.

Plans For Today

Getting a late start today, but this afternoon I’m going to dig in and focus on Tales of MU like nothing else.

The Daily Report

Thinking about holding onto things past the point of usefulness has got me examining some of my habits and modes of thinking. When I was younger, dealing with school and then jobs I worked because I had to, I acquired the habit of lying in bed as long as possible before getting up and wishing/hoping that when I look at the clock it will be early enough that I can roll over and get back to sleep, or just close my eyes and keep a pleasant fantasy going a little longer.

I believe this kind of escape was essential to my emotional survival in high school, and maybe useful in early adulthood. But now? I don’t have a job I dread. I have a job that means I don’t need to be alone and ensconced in blankets to close my eyes and retreat into a fantasy world. There are of course days when I have a hard time making the transition from asleep to awake for physiological reasons, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.

This is a habit that is maladaptive to my current life. It hampers my ability to have a set start time for my work, since waiting for the last possible minute means I’m usually eating breakfast and squaring things away at the official Start of Day. It robs me of the chance to do a little recreational reading or play a quick game at the best part of the day for it.

By the time I had this chain of thoughts this morning, it was already coming up on 10, but it’s something I’m going to keep in mind in the coming days.

The State of the Me

Doing well. Late yesterday I realized that at a certain point in the early spring, when I organized my pill bottles, I had inadvertently put my brain-stimulating ginkgo-ginseng combo pills away in a place where I don’t look for them. This might help explain why I’ve had such a hard time focusing even when my dopamine levels have been pretty decent.

Plans For Today

Yesterday went fairly well with the alternating hours. I’m going to be doing something similar today, but with more writing/fun bits, some of the fruits of which I’m planning on posting here. Explaining more would be giving something away.

The Daily Report

While I like to think of myself as a natural problem-solver, I’m coming to realize that one of the tools I rely on a bit too much is the work-around. When something breaks down or a plan doesn’t work out, my instinct is to salvage it before getting a replacement or coming up with something else. On a small scale and in the short term, this is probably a useful skill to have. My problem is that I wind up leaning on it, making do with things that are just getting worse and worse.

Case in point: my old computer. It had great specs for a non-gaming computer at the time I got it, but I was fighting its quirks from day one, and it was downhill from there. Yet as long as it “worked”—for a certain value of work—I stubbornly insisted on fighting it. How much creative energy did I burn out in frustration waiting for programs to load or dealing with its crashes? How much work did I lose, either literally and directly or indirectly through time spent troubleshooting and energy spent worrying?

I didn’t realize how bad it was until it died and I replaced it… but even then I didn’t realize quite how bad it had gotten. In the last several months in particular, I’d started putting off so much necessary stuff, basically pared my work day down to just the writing… which works fine when I’m on a creative tear, but just makes thing worse when I’m not. I need the other stuff as a palate cleanser, a way of shifting gears and not actively thinking about writing when it’s not going great.

Plus, you know, it’s necessary. The last part of the Volume I Omnibus has been sitting there forever, going nowhere. Stuff like that.

I wound up finding myself a bit lost last week, as I hadn’t realized how much stuff was piled up and had a bit of decision paralysis when it came to prioritizing it. This week, I’m starting out with two decisions.

One: first thing I do every day (after this status post) is e-book compilation/formatting. That was so great a way to transition my brain into work mode, right up until the only computer I could do it on decided that Office programs were an inefficient use of its aging RAM.

Two: number one priority this week, unshakable and unbreakable, is that I resume posting Tales of MU. New chapter goes up Friday. Period.

The State of the Me

Doing okay. Weekend was busy, sleep has been a little uneven.

Plans For Today

Since I got overwhelmed last week, I’m breaking today up into manageable one-hour chunks: one hour office stuff, one hour fun stuff like writing, one hour cleaning up my living and working space, repeat. If it works well, I’m going to incorporate the idea of Monday as a maintenance day into my routine, where I can clear up accumulated clutter and disorder or pick up tasks that I have fallen behind on.

The Daily Report

Well! It’s day one of working with the new computer. I left it working overnight so it would download my cloud folders. When I woke up this morning and came into the office, I thought it must have lost power or went to sleep, it was so quiet… but nope. It was actually still chugging along on my Dropbox, just chugging very quietly.

It’s a little surreal switching to a new computer in the age of the cloud. When I got my new laptop back around Christmas I got a little taste of it, but there was enough new to me about Windows 8 that it all seemed new. With this one, so much of my stuff carries over seamlessly that the stuff that I have to do by hand weirds me out a little.

I’m still using the same keyboard I was using before, which definitely lessens the feeling that I’m breaking a new thing in.

The State of the Me

Jack has a clogged sinus, and I woke up today feeling a little unusually sniffly. It might be nothing, just my summer allergies, but I’ll be keeping an eye on it.

Plans For Today

I had some very specific plans Monday, and then Tuesday, but yesterday was such an up-and-down day that there’s basically nothing left in my head after the relief. I guess I’ll try throwing myself into some random writing throughout the morning and early afternoon. In the afternoon, I’ll be catching up on some business emails. In late afternoon, I’m going to be getting myself back up to speed on Tales of MU.

So, after writing about how I was going to make due with my slow backup computer that was just as old as the main computer, I had it hang up on me completely twice and slow to an unworkable crawl more times than that throughout the morning and early afternoon. On top of that, it wouldn’t stay connected to the internet. I still kept trying to power through it, making the most of it, but I was near tears when Jack reminded me that he keeps a household emergency fund, and that me not having a working desktop computer is an emergency, as it essentially puts me out of work.

So we headed out for what I expected to be a short shopping trip. It’s been a while since I’ve been desktop shopping (did I mention that both my computers were from 2009?), so I grossly overestimated how much stock the stores would actually carry. Our Target essentially has gotten rid of their computer section. Best Buy had a decent selection of desktop computers, but they were split about evenly between way less than I needed and way more than I needed, with one computer that was tantalizingly almost in our price range and way beyond the specs I was looking for.

We ended up going on to H.H. Gregg, where the staff was very helpful, very knowledgeable, and very apologetic about the fact that their desktop section had been almost entirely replaced with more expensive all-in-one computers. Seriously, one of the best customer service experiences I’ve had in any kind of store, and almost unheard of in an electronics store.

We tried Office Max, where the staff was apathetic and seemed disdainful of assisting anyone who wasn’t a cis guy. I located a model on the floor that both fell within my technical needs and my price range, but it was almost impossible to flag down a staffer to retrieve it from the stockroom, as Office Max doesn’t have anything but the display models on the shelves. It’s not that there weren’t plenty of staff. It’s that they had no interest in seeing us. To no one’s surprise, the lone female staffer we spotted was the first one who actually recognized our existence, but the male associate she paged for us didn’t seem to think we were worth his time. When he came back from the staff room and reported that there was only one left and he couldn’t sell it because it was damaged… well, I’m not sure I believe that. The impression that he didn’t want to sell me a computer was that strong.

Staples also seems to have replaced all their in-store computer stock with all-in-ones and tablets. At this point, I was feeling pretty dispirited. It seemed obvious we weren’t going to be able to solve my computer problem today. I figured I’d come home, find something online—all these stores surely had more models available online than they carried in store—and then just focus on writing on my laptop while I waited for it to arrive.

But the pickings online weren’t that great. Everything in my price range was coming up as refurbished, which I did not want to roll the dice with again, or had a “decent RAM, decent processor, decent hard drive: pick two” thing going on. When I finally found one that hit all three categories and wasn’t just like new but was new-new, it was at the very top of the price range… and when I told Jack, he said, “If it’s that close, do you want me to just take more money out and we’ll go back to Best Buy?”

So we did.

Jack had to take a call when we got there, so I headed straight back to the computer section. There had been so many reversals of fortune and disappointments in the past two days, I was still braced for disaster and disappointment. And when I checked the shelves, it looked like my luck was holding bad: all the boxes were for the next model down, which was only $50 cheaper but half the hard drive and less RAM.

So I got an employee (much easier than at Office Max) and asked for help in computers. When he asked what I needed help with, I showed him the model I was looking at. His first response was a cheery and enthusiastic, “Oh, you know what you want! Great!” and his second response when he looked at the specs and price was, “Wow, that is a great deal!” Then he started checking the boxes, and I explained that I’d looked and they were all the other model. He of course double-checked them all anyway, as I would have expected, but he didn’t invalidate what I was saying, which was great.

He ended up having to go check on the computer to make sure it was in stock, then came back to tell him that there was definitely one, it was definitely in the building, he just had to find it. He was very apologetic about the wait, but it was way less time than we spent cooling our heels in Office Max and what’s more, I don’t actually care how long it takes someone to do something for me if it’s getting done. The way we were treated at Office Max gave me no confidence that the guy I dealt with was actually doing anything for me when he was out of our sight. On the other hand, Best Buy’s Ruben made sure that we knew he was taking care of us at every step of the way.

There were some tense moments along the way, like when we couldn’t find the model on the shelf, and when it rang up at its normal price rather than the reduced price listed on the sticker. It turned out that the promotion had actually been meant to end yesterday (4th of July sale, I guess?), but nobody had reset the shelf and so we got it for the sticker price.

So, today was not the awesome work day that I envisioned or hoped for, but it had a happy ending. I now have a computer I don’t have to fight with at all… which honestly, even when my main computer wasn’t rejecting its RAM, it was a lot flakier than I like to acknowledge.

I’m writing this on my brand new desktop, so I can testify that it’s working fine. It’s not quite work ready yet. I’m going to be installing my programs on it and then syncing my cloud folders and stuff this evening so that tomorrow morning I can get up, hop on, and get to work exactly like I wanted to today.

The Daily Report

I have been having a hard time finding my footing lately, after spending the first half of June sick and the second half swamped with outside obligations that would have been less of a big deal if I’d had any momentum going, creative or professional or whatever.

I had this big plan coming out of WisCon that I was going to start keeping to “office hours” much more rigorously, work to a schedule as much as the muse allows. The whole being on my back for more than a week kind of took the wind out of those sails pretty quickly. We’ll see how it goes this week.

The State of the Me

I have a headache today. I did not sleep well all last week, and I feel like I am paying for that now. Separately from the physical stuff, I am going through some personal turmoil. I am resolved that it is best both personally and professionally to proceed as normal during my work day, to get in a solid block of time when my mind is occupied by Other Things.

Plans For Today

Today, I have been and will continue to be spending an unknown amount of time installing and updating software on this computer, and otherwise getting it in working order. I will definitely be writing this afternoon, though I can’t say how inspired it will be after all this technical drudgery.

This week, I am back from a busy week and nigh unto miraculous week of family-ing in Nebraska. Yesterday I’d intended to throw myself back into it, but my main work computer died on me. It froze up completely while I was downstairs getting lunch, and would not finish booting after that. It gets as far as the “Starting Windows” screen, but the Windows symbol never starts to form. Startup Repair hangs as soon as the “loading files” bar is full. Safe Mode will show the list of system files being loaded and then freeze.

It did this shortly before my trip. I was able to determine that it wasn’t detecting one of the RAM cards, and re-seating all of them apparently fixed it. This time, no dice.

I still somewhat suspect the memory to be the problem… like one or more of the cards has gone a little off without failing completely, and so the whole thing breaks as soon as the computer needs to do anything terribly involved. The computer and its components are more than five years old. It doesn’t feel like it’s nearly that old because most of its lifetime was during the time I was bouncing between states half the year.

Progressive RAM failure isn’t the only possibility, but it seems the most likely one given that reshuffling the cards did briefly extend the computer’s usefulness. I suppose trying to boot up another operating system might help confirm if it’s a hardware issue or a Windows issue, but I have limited resources for dealing with this kind of problem at the moment.

I do have a backup computer, which is what I’m using now. It is another 5+ year old desktop unit, one that’s quite a bit less powerful but which has been used less often and has been far less finicky, hardware-wise. My currently-dead computer was a refurb model and it’s always been a bit strange about its RAM.

Still, this is not a long-term solution… this thing is so slow even just switching tabs in a browser. It is not very good at running the programs I need for things like editing and laying out books. Even just typing this blog post, I have to keep stopping to let the screen catch up with my text.

I’m not sure what I’ll do long-term. I’ve been mulling getting new RAM for my dead box, which would be a cheap fix if the problem is what I think it is, but kind of a waste if it’s not. The other alternative is to get a new desktop, which would be a bigger expense that I can’t really afford right now. Either way, I’ll probably be limping along as is for at least a week or two.