Stupid Novel Progress: Full Circle Again. Ready. Set. Write.

I’m now back to the Scene-Which-Would-Not-Be-Written from three weeks ago on The Stupid Novel, and it has become The-New-Chapter…or rather, it will be The-New-Chapter when it’s done.

1.1K words today. And I am, once again, writing. Not rewriting. Not editing. Writing. Shiny new words.

Not exactly an occasion for confetti and streamers, but I’ll take it. Um, except I’m stopping for tonight to commit some fantastical imaginary carnage with my fantastic (but not imaginary) band of fellow adventurers.

Bad Morning Start. A Confluence of Doh!

Very annoyed with myself this morning. Somehow I managed not to copy the files I was working on from my laptop to my Droid before I went to bed, so I don’t have what I did last night on The Stupid Novel. I clearly remember doing a bluetooth file transfer and thinking, “Better make sure I get those copied over now because I might be in a hurry and forget in the morning!” But obviously I am delusional, because they’re not there.

Dammit.

I also recently reset the cloud sync program on my laptop to only sync when I explicitly tell it to because the last auto sync kicked in at an inconvenient time and confused me as to which files had already synced and which ones hadn’t. Of course, I didn’t remember to do a manual sync last night, which I realized when I launched my Droid-side sync app, thinking, “Ah, no biggie, I’ll just pull the synced files down.”

Dammit. Dammit.

And what really makes me want to stomp my feet and gnash my teeth is that I had plenty of time this morning, and I even had a little mental checklist dialogue with myself:

“Okay, hair combed, shoes on, keys in hand. Lessee, is there anything I need to pull from my laptop to put on my Droid?”

“Nope, got everything before bed last night.”

“Hurray! Off to work I go.”

Dammit. Dammit. DAMMIT!!

I sent Matthew an email to call me when he wakes up so I can walk him through doing a manual sync. I can still work on The Stupid Novel without last night’s wordage, so it’s not important enough to rouse him out of bed. But I’m really mad at myself and this morning o’stupid.

Stupid Novel Progress: Almost Back to Three Weeks Ago

500 new words today on The Stupid Novel, and I’m one chapter away from the scene which stymied me three weeks ago. If I actually make it past that scene, I might, might consider upgrading the working title from The Stupid Novel to Taijiya, which is the original working title…from two freaking years ago. Glargh.

In other news, I started researching e-book formatting. Norilana uses Smashwords as a converter and distributor which has a helpful style guide. It’s a fairly laborious process to convert a print formatted text to e-book. Think I need to code me some macros. Yep.

Stupid Novel Progress: Petting the Plot Bunnies

Plowed through four chapters of The Stupid Novel today. Including rewrites and ruthless cutting, I netted a total of 1.3K words. I think there’s a decent chance the last hour or so of prose might be of the “See Jane nod. Nod, Jane, nod” variety, but it was chok full of plot bunnies. I’ll get some carrots and see if the bunnies are as hoppity tomorrow when I have a fresh morning brain instead of the tired bedtime one I’m currently sporting.

G’night bunnies. G’night brain. G’night Stupid Novel.

Best Droid Apps Revisited: Five New Fun Apps and Some Honorable Mentions

Rounding out my best Droid apps reprise are five additions to my “Most Fun” apps list:

  1. Furry Creatures 11 Clocks Set – A collection of clock widgets for your home screen that are shortcuts to the stock alarm settings. Not for everyone, but all the fuzzy beast clock widgets made me go squee. I’m a girl. They’re cute.
  2. iLightr Virtual Lighter – It’s a Zippo lighter you can flip open, flick to light, and blow out. The flame even responds if you tip the phone. It’ll make you the hit of any party…so long as no one needs a real light.
  3. IMDB Movies and TV – Been waiting for this one. The perfect companion to the Flixster Movies app.
  4. Instant Heart Rate – It measures your heart rate using your phone’s camera! You put your finger over the camera lens for ten seconds, and it displays your current heart rate. How cool is that? But do keep a soft, lint-free cloth handy to wipe the smudgy prints off your camera when you’re done.
  5. MyPod Podcast Manager – I was looking for a more feature rich podcatcher/player for my Droid than Listen. This is it. MyPod is not a basic podcast app. It’s a bit complicated to set up and use, tech-intimdated be warned, but it does everything you could ever want a podcast app to do.

And some honorable mentions: Continue reading

Best Droid Apps Revisited: Five New Most Useful Apps

As promised, following my review of five new “Most Essential” apps for my Droid, herein five additions to my “Most Useful” apps list:

  1. WordPress for Android – I’m typing this post into my WordPress blog on my WordPress website, so it’s not much of a surprise that when the WordPress for Android app came out, I glomped on it. “Write, edit, publish, and manage comments from my Droid?” I thought, “What could be sweeter?” But it was glitchy, full of bugs, unreliable. I left it installed for emergency WordPress updates on the go (I develop WordPress websites on the side and support/maintain several different sites) but was unimpressed-unto-disappointed.

    Then the developers put out a couple updates, fixed the glitches and bugs, added some shiny features, and it turned from “meh” to “squee!”

  2. Continue reading

Best Droid Apps Revisited: Five New Most Essential Apps

I compiled lists of my Top 10 Essential, Useful, and Fun Droid apps back in January, and since then, my Droid has been upgraded to Android 2.2 (Froyo), accompanied me to the Nebula Awards and Atlantis shuttle launch, and weathered Dragon*Con with me, and I’ve discovered new apps and retired old ones. I figured it’s high time I revisited my “Best Apps” lists.

Today I’ll review five additions to my “Most Essential” apps:

  1. LauncherPro – This is my most recent essential app find, and it has quickly gone from “essential” to ESSENTIAL.

    It’s a super-slick, super-smooth, super-fast home screen replacement to end all home screen replacements. It’s completely customizable with up to seven home screens and up to three scrollable docks, with each dock icon able to do two actions–the standard “tap here to launch app/do something” as well as a “swipe here to launch app/do something.” (So the dock, all by itself, can perform 30 separate actions–five icons in three docks multiplied by two!) LauncherPro also has a snazzy preview feature, i.e., see+select all your home screens on one screen; lets you hide apps in the app drawer that you don’t use (or just to keep things tidy); specify what the home key does; change how icons are highlighted when you select them; and specify how many rows and columns you want on your home screens. You can also choose from a number of stock docks, download custom docks from the dedicated forum, or create your own custom dock. And that’s just the free version. It is the god-king of home screen apps.

    LauncherPro epitomizes what I love about the Android platform: it improves on the stock, provides a dizzying array of options, is completely customizable, and has a thriving and enthusiastic user community. If I ever meet the developer, I will hug him.

  2. Continue reading

Stupid Novel Progress: Ripping Part 5 to Bits

Well, the good news is that I do seem to have rectified the “lost my characters’ voices” problem I was having in my last foray into finishing Part 5 of The Stupid Novel. The bad news is that re-finding those voices has shown me that huge swathes of Part 5 need to be rewritten.

The story couldn’t progress, and I needed to review Parts 1 through 4 in order to see how sections of Part 5 were fundamentally flawed. So I should be grateful to my writing subconscious/instinct/laziness that wouldn’t just let me plow forward. But I’m mostly mad at myself for writing such dreck in the first place. Meh.

However, I do think it’s still possible to bring The Stupid Novel to zero draft by November 1.

Chugging along.

Stupid Novel Progressing. To-Do List Not So Much.

By tabling nearly everything else this week, I’m making good progress on The Stupid Novel. Cut something like 1.3K words yesterday (and wow did they need cutting) and finished the editing pass on Part 4. Starting on the final section, Part 5, today. Might even be able to/hoping to start laying down new words.

But that does mean that I am, as always, falling behind on my to-do list. If you’re waiting on me for something, um, it’s going to be a bit longer. Sorry. Sorta afraid to do anything to derail my momentum at this point.

[Edit: Managed about 20 pages into Part 5 and realized that a massive rewrite was necessary. About 500 new words done today and much ruthless chopping. Brain feels like watery sludge. Rah.]

The Princess and the Golden Fish in Cricket

Just heard from my Cricket editor that “The Princess and the Golden Fish” is now slated for publication in the January through April, 2011, issues as a four-part serial. I knew it was going to be serialized, but I didn’t realize they were doing it in four parts.

I’m tickled, both to have a publication date for this story and because four parts means it gets that much more artwork. Hurray!