Hatrack River Writers Workshop: You have permission to kick me if...

This is topic You have permission to kick me if... in forum Open Discussions About Writing at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by Jaina (Member # 2387) on :

...I don't post 13 lines for either Eldras or something completely new within three days of March 21, 2005.

The reson for this is that I'm going on a mission trip over spring break (I'll be gone March 12-18) and will have no access to a computer. However, I am expected to keep a journal and write in it daily. I plan to write, not only my experiences on the trip itself (who knows, that might be an interesting story when all is said and done!), but a story. I'd prefer to work on Eldras, but if something else forces itself upon me, that's fine. I'm using this as an excuse to write something. We'll have time set aside for writing every day--I'd be a fool not to take advantage of it!

But I don't know if I'll force myself to do it if I don't have something to bring it back to, and something to do with it that's immediate and pressing. So I'm issuing myself a challenge.

Now, I'd better go get a notebook I can use, or I'll be black and blue come the 24th!

Posted by Beth (Member # 2192) on :

I will hold you to it!

Posted by MaryRobinette (Member # 1680) on :

We had a promise report thread going for awhile, but it morphed into a discussion of the term well-read. No. Please don't start that again.

But, Jaina, in addition to promising to kick you, I will also tag along on this thread, if that's all right.

Promise 1) I will finish editing and submit my novel Virus Attached by the end of August.
2) I'll beginning working on the novel Good Housekeeping in earnest.
3) Try to write one new short story and submit per month.

I am also pleased to report that at the moment all of my worthwhile stories are out making their rounds.

[This message has been edited by MaryRobinette (edited March 12, 2005).]

Posted by Minister (Member # 2213) on :

Good job, Mary!

BTW, I loved what I read of Virus Attached; I'd buy it in a heartbeat. If that doesn't sell, I think something is wrong with the publishing industry.

Posted by Beth (Member # 2192) on :

oh, it's great that all your stories are out in the air!

I've really liked the stories I've read from you - can't wait to read your novel.

Posted by MaryRobinette (Member # 1680) on :

What are other people working on? Who else needs a swift kick to help them keep a promise to themselves?

Posted by Robyn_Hood (Member # 2083) on :

All right!!! I'll stop procrastinating and being evasive.

My goal is to complete work on my Gruff Bluff story and have it on its way to its first market by the end of the month.

Posted by RFLong (Member # 1923) on :

To have my wip Arthgwr short story in first draft by the end of next week (with Paddys day in the middle and everything!)

And to think of a title for it...

Posted by Jeraliey (Member # 2147) on :

I promise not to write a word of fiction outside of class until I write my freaking medical school application.

I know it's not really in the spirit of the site (sorry, folks), but I seriously need to get it done!

And I also seriously need a kick in the tail!

Posted by MCameron (Member # 2391) on :

My goal is to finish my were-cat short story by next Friday (Mar 25) and post it to F&F to find readers.

That way I can switch gears and work on the rewrite challenge, which is goal number two.

So if my were-cat fragment is not posted by March 26, feel free to virtually kick me.

--Mel

Posted by Isaiah13 (Member # 2283) on :

I'll take a good swift kick. I've promised myself to have 3 more short stories post office ready by April 2nd. They're already written, I just need to do a few minor revisions and a solid edit on each. Sounds easy enough, but for some reason I'm having trouble bearing down on it.

Posted by RFLong (Member # 1923) on :

Yeay! I did it. Arthgwr is up in F&F, despite the best efforts of my daughter who will NOT go to sleep!

Think I'd better try to get some rest now.

Posted by MaryRobinette (Member # 1680) on :

Good job RFLong! I didn't even have to threaten to kick you.

[This message has been edited by MaryRobinette (edited March 21, 2005).]

Posted by RFLong (Member # 1923) on :

I know! Miracles really do happen!

Posted by ScottMiller (Member # 2410) on :

Do I have permission to kick myself?

The modem got fried, so, long story short, I'm using a brand-new PC here.

Thing is, I was the last person to use the previous PC. I don't know what I did to it (if anything, it was 7 years old) but I have this all-pervading sensation of guilt.

edit: Which is also why I haven't actually been around for a coupla weeks.

[This message has been edited by ScottMiller (edited March 23, 2005).]

Posted by Jaina (Member # 2387) on :

If you really want to kick yourself, far be it from me to halt such an amazing feat of flexibility.

You didn't lose anything permanently, did you? As in, you had everything backed up before you crashed and burned? Sure hope so, because I've lost a couple of stories to dead computers, and it's a real pain. I've taken to emailing myself stories so I have an online copy, in addition to printing stuff out and saving copies on CDs (I don't have a floppy drive).

Posted by Shendülféa (Member # 2408) on :

Floppy drive, eh, Jaina? Who has one of those anymore? I haven't seen one of those archaic pieces of machinery since...since--how long was that?--ah yes, seven or so years ago. Man, I thought I'd never even hear those things ever mentioned again except in history texts.

[This message has been edited by Shendülféa (edited March 24, 2005).]

Posted by TaShaJaRo (Member # 2354) on :

Scott - your modem fried so you bought a whole new computer? That sounds like an excuse more than an event.

Actually, modems are flaky little things and can fry if you look at them wrong. The two most common things that destroy modems are lightning strikes (people don't think to unplug their phone lines or modems - I lost quite a few myself back in the day) and someone plugging a digital phone line into it instead of an analog. I doubt the latter is the case unless you were using a laptop and took it to a business and plugged it into any old phone.

So, I wouldn't feel too guilty and see it as a good excuse for a new computer. Well, a decent excuse, anyway.

Posted by Jaina (Member # 2387) on :

Well, of the three craptastic computers my parents have at home, two still have floppy drives. I think I've even got a couple of floppy disks floating around somewhere, though I couldn't tell you where. What can I say? My family is at least seven years behind in everything when it comes to computers. I try to keep them up-to-date enough so that they're semi-compatible with everybody else in the galaxy, but it's a full-time job, and I'm only able to do it part-time.

Posted by MCameron (Member # 2391) on :

*sighs in relief* I got my were-cat fragment posted with five minutes to spare. This story still needs a lot of work, but at least the basic framework is done! This is the first story I've finished since high school. Yay!

--Mel

Posted by Jeraliey (Member # 2147) on :

Congrats, Mel!!!! Ain't it a great feeling?

Posted by Survivor (Member # 213) on :

Hey! I've never had a computer without a floppy drive, I'll have you know. Of course, I remember the days when a 10 meg hard drive was a thing of awe. I still use my floppy drive too, I used it just the other day. When I was in Virginia pondering my brother's lack of a floppy drive on his laptop and my other brother's lack of a firewire port, wireless network hub, or even a direct connection lan cable, I was seriously flummoxed. I could have gone to my sister's house and plundered a USB storage device or something, but I decided to just redownload the file from somewhere on the internet after all.

True, of the various options, a twist-pair lan cable would have been the most cost effective/versitile option, and now I'm sorry I didn't find the thing and pack it. Ethernet cards rank ahead of even USB in ubiquity and such, after all, and the cable is pretty cheap. Still, arch conservative that I am, it was the lack of a floppy that irritated me. Or it might be because leaving the cable behind was really my own fault....

Posted by Jaina (Member # 2387) on :

I was teasing. I was actually shocked when I found out that my computer doesn't have a floppy drive, and a little annoyed, since that meant that I had to transfer all my stories onto CD-RW's to get them on here. I didn't even know what a USB storage device was, at that time. It's amazing what you learn in college... and I'm not talking about the classes!

Posted by ScottMiller (Member # 2410) on :

Jaina: No, everything was backed up on floppys and zip disks (can't use them on this PC, of course; all it has is one DVD-ROM drive and one CD-R/W drive, stupid march of technology!), so it's still floating around.

The old PC is still (somewhat) functional, though, so I can still type on it and print things out. I just can't connect anything to the Internet.

TaSha: It wasn't my decision. I never got to put money down on the first PC (I was unemployed at the time), and my dad, in particular, is technology-phobic (my brother and I gave him and my mom a DVD/VCR combo a few years ago at Christmas, and my dad still rents videotapes instead, because he thinks that he's being cheated when he sees a "widescreen" picture and that the black bars ruin everything). They never did any hardware maintenance or anything and I didn't have enough time to do everything on my own. They were in fact still using Windows 95. I did almost get them to upgrade to Windows 98 many years ago, but my dad hates learning anything new (this is not age-related; I recall him being equally frustrated with cable TV about twenty-two years ago).

Anyway, HP "help" center told them that the modem was too obsolete to be replaced (I doubt it, I think they were too lazy to tell us how; we had USB ports, I'm sure I could have rigged up something, in retrospect), we didn't have enough memory to run any new software (probably true, it was a Pentium), and blah blah blah, so they panicked and bought a new PC with their tax refund. (The sickening thing is, it was $400 cheaper than the one that broke, yet it's about a zillion times faster and has a 160-gig hard drive, which I have already started fragmenting by burning copies of out of print LPs out of my collection to CD.)

Since they wanted a new PC anyway, you're probably right. I just kept my mouth shut, threw some cash in, and let them do what they wanted. It is better in some ways, but I hate Windows XP. I've hated every version of Windows back to 3.1 (except for Windows NT, which I never used, although I'm sure I would have hated that too), though, so I'm not a reliable judge.

Posted by Survivor (Member # 213) on :

You could have bought a barebones and installed Linux on it. If I ever have to scratch build another computer, I'm so going with Linux. If there is one horror that I will carry to my grave, it is the memory of endlessly suffering through the full Windows installation procedure with an untested configuration. I hope that hell is more fun than that.

HP probably wasn't lying, by the way. If the computer was that old then the modem was probably ISA rather than PCI, and they don't make anything ISA anymore.

Posted by ScottMiller (Member # 2410) on :

Survivor: I looked it up and, yep, it's ISA.

My ears are burning, because of my complaining, but it's nice to know that the purchase was warranted (and putting in my savings was therefore a Good Thing). My problem is, I don't know that much about tech, so I'm never sure when I'm being jived by tech support or when I'm hearing the truth.

Posted by Survivor (Member # 213) on :

For buying computers, I like to boil all my saavy down to one rule of thumb. Stay at the shallow end of the pool. I'm a bit the same way about software. If I can do something with a simple program that has a 1 meg executable, then I'm not going to mess with a 300 meg installation that does the same thing.

But that's because I need every scrap of spare storage to hold anime

Posted by Robyn_Hood (Member # 2083) on :

All right! I did it. My Gruff story is in the mail and out of my hands...off to its very first market

!!!!

I'm very nervous at this point, but oh well, it gives me something to look forward to now.

O.K., now for my next set of goals...

By April 15th I must polish up my story, "Something in the Air", and send it out to a market that accepts re-prints.

By the end of the month I must be mostly finished my revisions to my Christmas Story, "Greater than Gold".

Posted by RavenStarr (Member # 2327) on :

"By April 15th I must polish up my story, "Something in the Air", and send it out to a market that accepts re-prints."

Where was it printed?

Posted by Robyn_Hood (Member # 2083) on :

It was originally published on-line through Quantum Muse. At the end of this month, it will be removed from their archives and rights will revert back to me (or something like that...

I've located a market that accepts submissions for re-print, but I really need to polish the story up a bit (see my thread on re-print protocols for more details ).

[This message has been edited by Robyn_Hood (edited March 30, 2005).]

Posted by Jaina (Member # 2387) on :

Good luck with that!

For my part, I need to rewrite the ending to Wendell and have it out for crit by the end of April.

And it would be nice to have an apartment sometime in the near future, which has very little to do with writing except that I won't be doing much of it until I find a place to live next semester.

Posted by RFLong (Member # 1923) on :

Hi all

to edit Elements this weekend (or at least by the end of next week). If I'm lucky I might even get some done tonight.

In deference to Scott's experience I did a fresh backup of all my work onto CD which I then took into work with me (in case the house burns down or something). Ever the optimist...