I think I’m getting things down a bit better. I had very little time today, and made a bit of progress. Hope it keeps going.
Month: August 2006
1-Pass Day 15: (12485/99973)
Today didn’t go at all to plan. We had a pile of places to be today, but Rachel isn’t feeling herself, so we ended up staying home. On the plus side Denise was kind enough to give me time to work on the book (thank you!), so here I am posting an update. Some of the chapters look a bit shorter that I want them, but I’m going to finish the type in and think about what to do afterwards (if anything).
Not Happy
Things haven’t been going well lately. Not in any way. So far, today continues that trend.
I got up early to work on my type in. My current speed is about ten minutes per page to get it done. I’ve got over 500 pages left, so that’s well over 80 hours of work left if I don’t manage to speed up somehow. So I don’t need additional setbacks.
I mentioned before that I started doing revisions in WriteWay Pro. It’s pretty good in a lot of ways. After finishing two scenes this morning I thought I should do a global search and replace on a changed character name. Now I’m used to working in OpenOffice.org where this same type of activity on this same size document is fairly speedy. Also I have OpenOffice.org set up to auto-save a copy of the file every few minutes. I do this because when I get working I loose track of things like real life. I’m sure you can see where this is going. After watching the simple Search & Replace peg my CPU usage at 100% for about 20 minutes and error came up. When I clicked “OK” WriteWay Pro just went away. Not good.
I opened WriteWay back up, looked at where my edits left off and mourned the last hour of my life which was a complete and utter waste of time. Now I have to go to work, so here’s to yet another day with no writing progress.
1-Pass Day 14: (4109/101920)
Picked up a cheap document holder to see if it would help me keep my place when moving from page to screen. It does.
‘Dursin the Firestarter’ Hits the Net
The first time I saw YouTube I knew this day would come. It was only a matter of time. Dursin the Firestarter is online (well, so far just the first scene).
“What is Dursin the Firestarter?”, you ask. Back when I was in high school Dursin and John used to make a lot of movies. The greatest of these was Dursin the Firestarter, a feature length remake of the original trilogy of earlier shorts (Matt Dursin the Incredible Firestarter, Dursin the Firestarter Part 2, and Dursin the Firestarter Part 3). It may not be a great film, but it is amusing. I have a small roll in there somewhere (in fact you can see me in the movie poster), and I provided some of the sound effects in the latter half of the film. Check it out. Be warned that the film would definitely get an R rating for language, so it may not be work safe.
1-Pass Day 13: Starting the Type-in
There’s a ton going on, and I don’t have the time to go into it now. The important thing is I started the Type-in finally. I’ve migrated from OpenOffice.org to WriteWay Pro. It has it’s good and bad, but I’m going to give it some more time before going into it.
Anyway, tracking progress should be interesting, since the total word count will fluctuate as I go. So here’s where I started:
0/106270
And here’s where I finished for the day:
The beginning is mostly cuts and rewording to make things tighter. Hopefully I’ll get some momentum and be able to move faster.
Gaaaaaaaaaaah! Argh!!
Stressed out lately. Nothing much else to say.
OK Go: Here It Goes Again
Saw this over on Del’s site. I haven’t watched a music video in quite some time, but it’s nice to see there are still some folks having a good time.
Listen in on the Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman Book Tour
I have fond memories of reading the Dragonlance Chronicles and Legends trilogies, so I’ve been looking forward to Dragons of the Dwarven Depths from Mararet Weis and Tracy Hickman since I saw mention of them working in Locus.
Tracy is broadcasting their entire book tour on his DragonHearth podcast. I’m not sure if that’s ever been done before or not, but it’s the first time I’ve heard of it. I really enjoyed being able to hear the Q and A sessions from the book tour. Hearing them talk about the new book, the old books, and the upcoming movie has really got me itching to read some more of their books again.
As of now, all the book tour shows are still available on the DragonHearth feed. Check them out.