Well, I’m reduced to my portable computer at the moment.  My Sony all-in-one gave up the ghost yesterday morning and refused to turn on.  No, I didn’t lose any writing files – I back those up.  But I decided I needed my email badly enough to pay to get it transferred (I could do this myself, but not with a computer that won’t power up).  In that hopefully-not-lost email is the data I need to send out my weekly update to the people who sponsored me – so I’ll miss week two, I guess.   Have to figure out how to make that up.  I also decided that with the rest of my ecosystem going Mac (driven by the iphone to the ipad to the Air) I’d just bite the bullet and go to the iMac for a desktop.  This will probably mean some grumping as I’ve lost the ability to use the PC to do the stuff I couldn’t figure out on the Mac, not to mention a chunk of cash outlay I wasn’t expecting.

Here’s hoping the guys with Geek Squad hats do well, especially given that I kind of lost it over the fact that they felt a need to charge an extra thirty bucks to load a copy of Office for the Mac that I already owned onto the new computer.   The $150 transfer fee (higher than normal because of the dead computer in the process) made perfect sense, but this last charge made none at all to me.  Now, I manage an IT shop, so I know that the customer being grumpy doesn’t help staff feel like doing a great job.  So let’s hope they do well in spite of me.  🙂

So…no writing today.  Not because I don’t have other tools, but there are only so many hours in a day and figuring out what to do and doing it took some time.

On the plus side, I got to meet most of the Clarion West students yesterday.  That was fun.  This is the reason for the Write-a-thon – the hopeful, interesting, faces that we may all get to read published work from in the future.   I also got a completely unsolicited compliment on my story, “The Hebras and the Demons and the Damned” which is in this the new Year’s Best Sixteen volume edited by David Hartwell.  Sometimes those comments show up on the days you need them.

Tomorrow will be more writing oriented.  I promise.