Monday, December 14, 2009

Harddrive Deaths & Other Mysteries of Life

Ever since finishing NaNo on November 30th, I have been having inspirational deliriums that are seriously waking me up from a sound sleep! Or keeping me from sleeping at all. Dreams about a Fae named Arsar and souls caught to bodies and Restoration astrologers and Rune-Earls – seriously, I have no idea where this shit comes from. Probably the same place where Vamperace, the Vampire Liberace, came from and some plans for a Dungeons & Dragons 4.0 0-Level series of games I hope to run early next year featuring Yuan-Ti and spice and Girth Bi'ttoms and his daughter, Maythee.

But mostly I keep dreaming about Arsar and his human foil, Rhys. For NaNoWriMo, the character of Anne sort of haunted me for a few months. Since my mind ticks and purrs all the time, I sort of have to trick it into letting me go to sleep, so I make up stories before going to bed. One night, a blonde woman in a black mid-Victorian dress (probably based on Irene Forsyth) turned around in a room lit by sunlight, only slowly revealing her face as I waited for her to turn. She was being introduced to someone – but I had no idea who it was. She turned into Anne Edwardes – who is currently lost until I can scare up a USB harddrive enclosure to rescue her.

I am officially an idiot. Seriously.

The harddrive on my newish (6 months old) laptop blew up on me Saturday morning – as in the blue screen of death and all that heart wrenching madness. As a measure of my insane priorities, all of my music is on my external harddrive and fine... but not my NaNo novel! Or my FanFix Chapter 16 – and seriously I don't know if I have the stamina to rewrite that. Or the notes I had made about my very slowly evolving zombie love story and a couple pages of notes I had taken after waking up from my dream about Arsar. I was sort of frantic – particularly as I don't think I can function as a human being without internet access (I think I was born to exist in the world of Shadowrun) – and after trying to boot XP off the disc and running diagnostics realized it was pretty much a lost cause. Thankfully, I spent a pleasant two hours on the phone with Dell, only fifteen of those minutes with a gentleman who kept calling me 'Mum,' who was extraordinarily impressed that I hadn't threatened to climb through the phone and rip his head off. So they're sending me a new harddrive and after scouring listservs and forums, realized that I might be able to rescue Anne Edwardes and other things. For now, she is doubling as the Lady of Shalott – behind some faulty electronic circuitry, plastic casing and a polyethelene bag.

Thankfully my older laptop – a Latitude 110L that had been taking up space in my dresser – had been completely reformatted after an unfortunate and lingering malady was able to serve in my newer computer's stead. Although the Latitude doesn't have a DVD drive and weighs at least four-hundred pounds. And didn't have a LAN driver or updates that took two days to complete. But with the aid of Lena, I was able to get that taken care of. I get a big golden star for solving my own networking problems almost completely on my own – although I may have ripped out some hair in the process.

Because I can't stop thinking about Arsar and apparently have completely lost the ability to write in longhand, I have started putting thoughts and thoughts and more thoughts down in bytes. That I am backing up in at least four places. Four places not on this computer.

I also started re-reading the Harry Potter series, although I'm currently obsessed with Kristin Cashore's Graceling. I want Kristin Cashore to write me 2,000 pages of just Po and Katsa together beating up people and living and doing things that they would do – there doesn't even have to be a plot, just lots of pages of the characters doing normal life things. Since I am in love with Po (of Graceling), I would give anything to be able to write a character that I actually lost myself to in reading it. When I write things, I have a hard time dropping into the prose without having to fix it or just seeing words and sentences. I think it's because I already know what is going to happen and I love to be completely surprised (although, understandably, in good ways rather than bad) when reading a story. Now if only Patrick Rothfuss would finish the sequel to The Name of the Wind. I also love Kvothe – and I am dying, literally dying to know more about Kvothe's life before becoming an “evil” magician.

That and getting my hands on a physical copy of Piers Anthony's On a Pale Horse without having to buy it. Simple things, really. But important to me.

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