New Toys!

Okay I'm taking a short break from the political ranting and ravings of my normal madness and instead taking a bit of time to unwind and revel in my new toy, and as such this will be my first posting from my brand shiny new laptop.

Admitedly it's not a screaming new gaming system .... but it should certainly be able to handle what I got it for - writing. The goal being that I can more easily keep my writing together and not end up with 10 versions on my system at home and 15 or so on my PC at the office. Now I'll just do all my writing here on the laptop.

I've also started using a new 'novel' writing program: yWriter 4 ... no it doesn't write the novel for me ... what would be the fun in that. But it does help me break down my scenes, establish goals, track characters, locations and items, along with help keep my notes organized. It's also designed so that scenes and chapters can easily be moved and rearranged in the editing process. For NaNoWriMo writers it also has an 'export as Nanowrimo obfusicated text' ... not that I ever bothered going through all that trouble, but I understand that some people are paranoid about the issue. I also found it hard to argue with the price ... free is hard to beat.

On top of this the wife and I are considering doing an extended novelling project next month ... would be from April 1 - May 31st with a goal of 80,000 words. While on the one hand this should, technically, be easier than a 30 day NoWriMo (50,000 words in 30 days is 1667 words a day, while 80,000 in 61 days is only 1312 words a day) I suspect that managing an 80k word work may well be a challenge in itself .... also 61 days of that kind of writing while keeping the internal editor locked in the closet will certainly be a test.

Also, a while back I got my wife a new drum kit ... her first ... a nice Simmons SD7K electric drum kit. (I think we would both have prefered an accustic set, but those take space we don't have) and she's been learning fast. So I also just got us both a bunch of sheet music so that we can practice playing songs together ... we've played together a bit with her playing the drum lines from some of my bass lessons and we've had a lot of fun with it.

Given our first amature attempts at one of the songs, don't be expecting to hear audio files of us jamming on the blog any time in the near future .... unless we're recording us playing Rock Band ..... audio only of course. ;)