On the good side - The Wish Pony, rough draft, is finished. Weighs in at 32079 words - though that will change, of course, when the revising is done. I've gone through the stages of loving it, hating it, worrying about it, hating it and back to feeling okay.
Tomorrow I'll shine the first three chapters, write a more exciting synopsis than I managed last week and send it to my editor. More or less on target.
On the bad side - I still cannot get my pda and my ipod to work on Ubuntu. Now, the Dell people did say the pda wouldn't work, but I have WINE (no, Mother, not the alcholic sort - the windows is not an emulator sort of emulating sort. That hasn't made any difference. Well, it has made a minimal amount of difference in that I can practically install iTunes. But not entirely. There are errors.
On the ugly side - and this is bad, really bad. My pda lost all power in Trentham - I thought it was highly charged, but it thought differently. It shut down completely. Therefore it now, highly charged and again and raring to go, has ABSOLUTELY NO DATA IN IT. It is backed up to the PC. Of course it is. The PC, however, has no usb ports working and nor does the usb hub. Why? We don't know. We just don't know. Is it the hub? Maybe. The hub has a lose frame thing due to a missing screw. It's little light comes on intermittently. However, the pda plugged straight into the usb port at the back (the one I thought was still functional) claims not to be connected. The second hub's little light flickered on once, and then off again. Like a falling star. The iPod won't work in any hub. So, it's ugly. Also, when will it all get better? That's really what I want to know. When will I have a functional pda and an iPod I can download on again? Should I go back to the filofax? Should I go back to the humble cd-on-the-laptop? The thing is, I rather thought this would be the year of the pda - I'd download my knitting patterns on it, keep a record of my stash, start to really use it and - Bingo! - out of action. I was also delighted to discover how to download audio books on to the iPod - this was to be the summer of audiobooks - the great camping adventure audio experience. Aaagh!
Never mind, think of the 32000 words. Think of getting it finished the very day before at least a bit of it had to be submitted. Think of the modern quilt wrap nearly finished, too. Wearable, as it is - well almost, I need to get rid of thousands and thousands of ends. Lovely. What a calming thought. What a meditative thought. Thousands. And. Thousands. 32000 words. That's a lot. More than there are ends. This could be a mantra. Thousands of ends. 32000 words. Alasdair come home and learn Ubuntu. Ends. Words. Ubuntu.
A blog where I talk about the reading, writing, post the Tuesday Poem and, sometimes, show some knitting.
6 comments:
Te best way to solve computer problems like this is to google them. Google will find the answers on user forums etc. Just as a test I googled 'ubuntu USB ports' ad got over one million hits. It may take a while to fid something useful, but I usually do within ten minutes.
Sorry about the spellos - my keyboard is playing up!
Hi m-h,
Yep - I'm sure it will all work eventually! There are some pretty good ubuntu forums around, too - they've been very helpful.
Catherine
What's wish pony based on?
You must have heaved a sigh of relief when you had finished. Did you write THE END with a big flourish?
The Wish Pony is a story about a girl who meets a mysterious neighbour - Magda - just when she needs to. It's for younger readers and will be published next year, around August, I believe.
Gloria - do you know, I never write 'The End'? I don't think I've ever done that! How weird, when I think about it.
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