feuervogel | Progress report

Yesterday I managed to get 12 words added before deciding that my afternoon would be better spent taking a nap on the couch. I didn't get nearly enough sleep over the weekend, and I needed to catch up.

Today, I got 308 words and figured out what to do with that misplaced scene I was stuck on last week, for a total of 84128 words with 43 days left to go. Azar only has 7 scenes left, then I go back to the beginning and do Hikaru's.

Then, hopefully, I'll have my 90k+ and be able to get it to a couple betas during July, while I work on the synopsis and outlining the first book (the one about the coup). Another project for after draft completion is to get a bootable USB thing set up for my netbook, which doesn't have enough HD space to download software updates. I have a 4GB USB key, and I'm not afraid to set up Ubuntu on it (though I'm not sure exactly how it works, either. Well, that's what the internet and how-tos are for.)

And thanks to a friend's themed party, I really want some of this. It tasted like fizzy lemon with just the hint of beer. Very dangerous, because it'd be easy to drink an entire 6-pack.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Unfortunately, I have no clue how to "burn" an Ubuntu .iso onto a USB with a Mac. The first time I did it from a Windows computer, I used a 3rd party utility. But once I got it on there, I just had to boot from the USB and never had to do an fdisk. If I can help at Readercon, let me know. My USB will be in the go bag, like it always is. :)

If Scrivener for Linux ever comes out, I'm there. Rather, I'll try it at least. I've worked to make myself as OS-agnostic as possible when it comes to my writing. As long as a box can read and write .txt and .rtf files, I'm good to go.

Should I just leave the old OS on the netbook itself? There has to be an OSX utility to make an iso, and if not, there's a handy BSD command line.

I'm a Mac user, at least for my computing needs, so I don't mind being stuck with that for writing. Scrivener is compatible with the way my brain works, which isn't, strictly speaking, linear, so the ability to drag and drop a scene into an earlier or later section (and revise to fit continuity as needed) is wonderful. I tried that in a short story, and I ended up making a mess. Stupid OpenOffice.

That's hard to say, not knowing the rest of your netbook's specs. From what I understand, though, Ubuntu Lite is kinda supposed to do what Puppy Linux does, like work on older systems (like, p3 old, which is why I have it). My netbook's a pretty "old" model by now, and I'm running Ubuntu 10.04. I don't quite remember if the install took much more than 3GB of space, if that (not including a swap file, but still, if you're using that much space anyway, it might be worth it to switch, and use that 4GB USB to store your files...?

When I used Windows, I used a program called PageFour, which was basically opened up groups of .rtf files as tabs. So I did all my brainstorming and drafting there, and would only use OpenOffice for formatting and polishing. Once I found out that Ubuntu's text editor did essentially the same thing, I never looked back. Granted, I don't know if I could write a novel that way, either. But then, I've always been a short story kinda guy. :)

I don't have any files stored on it, since I got it primarily to use for taking with me to do email while traveling (for pharmacy work, mostly, but that's dried up). Also, there's not even enough free memory to hibernate the stupid thing.

I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on it until I have this draft finished, which is going to be by 1 July. That'll give me a little time to figure it out before the almost-week-long trip to Boston (including 2 days of train each way).

Progress report

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