Downtime

I caught a cold, something I'd been avoiding for the past two months while everyone around me, it seemed, was getting it. So far it's very minor, just a bit of fever and sniffling, but I'm spending Sunday at home and trying not to do much. It's another absolutely spendid fall day in San Francisco -- quite cool in the morning, sunny all day. Too bad I'm "wasting" the beautiful weather by staying inside, but I know from experience that if I rest on the first real day of a cold, I'm much happier for the following week.

What's sicker is my laptop. Two years ago I got a Gateway laptop with Windows ME and it's worked great until about a month ago, when the hard disk started acting up. It makes a clacking sound, has boot errors from time to time, and once in a while simply crashes. I called Gateway and they had me download a utility that would supposedly scan and repair the disk. But the utility didn't find any disk errors, while the problems continue. I guess the only real solution is to replace the hard drive while backing up my work at the end of every work session. I've been doing the latter, and sometimes I back up files to a floppy during a work session, so I won't lose even an hour's worth of work.

Even so, yesterday the only work I did on my book was on the outline. Thought I "completed" the outline of the final chapters for the first time a couple of weeks ago, I always knew it was subject to change, and yesterday I realized I'm going to have to give a little more weight to the B story as the climax approaches. However, I'll spare readers any extended notes like the ones I quoted in my entry of the 14th. I just wanted people to get an idea of how I work. Those notes are from a file which is half as long as the book itself -- it documents the creation of the book and is, itself, sort of a shadow of the book, or a meta-book. It contains not only the characters and plot lines that actually go into the book, but all the alternatives I reject along the way. The contents are, of course, only of interest to me, but the technique may be of interest to other writers.