Technical Difficulties

1. We had a thirty-six hour internet outage yesterday and today. SO not amused.

2. Also not amused by Wisconsin's governor. But yay for the 30,000 protesters!

3. Sean Wallace has posted the cover mock-up for the new edition of The Bone Key. I am in love with the cover art.

4. 169 copies of Unnatural Creatures have arrived! I have signed and numbered the entire print run, and this weekend will be all about making up orders and shipping them out.

5. Today, Milo and I cantered off the lunge line! This is huge, because the last time I tried cantering off the lunge line, back in May, I fell off the horse. It's taken my instructor and me this long to get me to the point where I was ready to try again, and OMG it felt completely different and SO MUCH BETTER. Completely psyched.

Word believes that "although" is hyphenated "alt-hough." And due to the UTTER IDIOCY of their quote-unquote "manual" hyphenation feature, you cannot correct it.

Although (ha), even that isn't as bad as what it did to Coleridge. There will be one change in the text of "White Charles," as the only way to prevent Word from hyphenating it "Co-leridge"--drawing a discreet curtain over the interim carnage--was to add in "Samuel Taylor," to get "Coleridge" away from the end of the line.

At the moment, I have three word processors on my computer: MS Word 2000, WordPerfect 12, and Open Office 3.0. As you (may) know, oh interweb-Bob, I loathe Word with a white-hot passion. So why, you ask, do I have it on my system?

An excellent question, interweb-Bob! I'm so glad you asked.

Originally, I only had WP. I've used WP for years and years; I like it in direct correlation to the degree with which it differs from Word. (This means, of course, because WP has been handed through a succession of increasingly stupid companies, that I have liked it less and less, but that's a different problem.) But I am also well aware that it is going the way of the dodo as Microsoft eats more and more of the software market, and if I want other people to be able to read my files--and that's more and more how things work these days--I need to be thinking forward about cross-platform compatibility and what I do when WP finally turns up its little toes and dies.

But I hate Word and Microsoft and their little dog, too. So Open Office looked like it might be a good solution. I've been using OO for a couple months, and it's . . . meh. It does not irritate me to screaming point the way Word does, because it makes fewer assumptions about what I want, but it's a Word clone, so I dislike it for all the reasons I dislike Word.

And then there was this weekend's snafu, in which OO decided that an .rtf file (of the draft of the new wolf book) it had opened and saved happily the night before was now unopenable. (Word, when I installed it, concurred. WP opened it without complaint, but of course lost all the Track Changes formatting which is kind of essential to the whole collaboration process. This required kind of a lot of work on my part to remake the file, and I was Not Happy about it.)

Which leads me to my imponderable. If I can't use OO to go back and forth with an .rtf file, is there any reason to use it at all? Am I not going to be happier--since I don't like OO anymore than I like Word--using WP for my own files and Word for my collaborations? Except then that whole WP-in-decline thing is still an issue, and I don't know what the hell to do.

Yes, this is the sort of thing writers think about when we should be working.

TIME: 37+ min.
DISTANCE 4.5+ mi.
TOTAL DISTANCE: 120.6 mi.
NOTES: The technology betrayed me by resetting itself, so I don't know exactly how long or how far I rowed.
SHIRE-RECKONING: We're heading for the Road, tra la.

WordPerfect has become unstable.

As in, it crashes almost as soon as you open a file. (This would be, of course, the first person singular "you.") It has done so now four times in a row, including after a reboot. The "recovery" wizard is as useful as a screen door on a submarine, thank you very much.

I am not a happy Mole.