Sharp Words

Sad news: it appears that my beloved desktop is well and truly dead. My Darling Smart Ass has been working on it, but it refuses to recognize its new hard drive. He says we will have to wipe it and reload Windows, which I believe would make it something other than the grouchy machine I’ve been working with for the past five years. (And it would kill the scads and scads of software cracks I loaded on it back before I decided to be an upstanding citizen and pay for all my software–oh, the remnants of my reckless youth!)

Darling Smart-Ass put a comforting hand on my shoulder and said, “It’s eight years old, that’s a long, full life for a desktop. I think it’s time you put it out of its misery.”

Me: “I can’t! You don’t know what adventures we had, what stories I wrote on it, what lovely, lovely software it ran.”

Him: “Do you remember that movie, the one about the dog where the boy had to shoot it at the end?”

Me: “My desktop is NOT Old Yeller.”

Too late. Smart Ass has now christened it “Old Yeller” and is urging me to let it go. It’s sitting beside my desk right now, all hulking and ginormous, yet still outdone in processing power and efficiency by my slim little laptop. Sure, the laptop has most of the programs I need to do my thang, but it just isn’t the same. It doesn’t have the same soul. Me and Old Yeller, we were a team. We stuck together through power-supply issues, dust-bunnies, and tense, nail-biting sessions of anti-vir. I’ll miss it.

Some good news:… I passed my final. Whew! And, Yay. That was a couple of weeks ago, but I haven’t posted. To some extent, I’ve been busy writing. I narrowed my focus down to three WsIP, and then to two. I decided that just because you can write two distinct first person stories at the same time, doesn’t mean you should.

What have I been up to? Besides the evil math class, I signed up for a creative writing course on short stories because I have always wanted to take one. The teacher was good, but I feel sorry for him because he wrote Literature and talked about dream goals like selling a story to the New Yorker, and almost everyone in the class wrote genre fiction. He seemed at a loss for a way to judge genre fiction by literature standards.

I was fascinated by the sheer number of young people interested in writing sci-fi and horror (no one admitted to Romance). The class was interesting, and I liked the structure of assignments and due dates, but it started to get in the way of my math studying (that class took over my life) and my writing goals, so I dropped it. Maybe some other time.

I do, however, have a few assignments I did for the class, which I will post in pieces to make up for what would otherwise be a spare posting schedule in the run-up to conference.

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