robert's blog featuring ari >^..^<

2011-08-14T02:27:00.002-04:00

I moved to San Francisco! I found out in mid June that I had to move out. Kitten and Karl got the house with 20 acres they'd been hoping for and so Kitten's mare and filly will be living with her. The new house isn't large enough for me to live there with them though. So I had to move on August 1st. Kitten knew I was saving up to move to San Francisco someday, so she suggested just going there

2010-01-22T10:01:00.002-05:00

Oak Tree Bole6" x 9"Pastel on light blue Canson mi-Tientes pastel paper.Painted from the second demo by Scottyarthur on http://www.wetcanvas.com in Soft Pastel Talk forum, the "Starting my Tree Studies" thread. This time I followed his demo tree for shape and successfully did a portrait of his specific oak tree instead of just loosely drawing a similar one. But I played with the colors and

2010-01-22T09:58:00.002-05:00

An Oak Tree6" x 9"Pastel on light blue Canson Mi-Tientes pastel paper.Painted a few days ago from a demo by Scottyarthur on http://www.wetcanvas.com in the "Starting my Tree Studies, Join In if you Like" thread in Soft Pastel Talk. The tree loosely follows the demo, the rest of the landscape is all from my imagination. It was a leap for me being able to get the creek and landscape to look that

2010-01-22T09:54:00.003-05:00

Wrote a short story for a 3 Day Challenge in my critique group. After some trouble sending it because I had used the wrong email, it's now gone out to my critiquers. Also did three critiques on Challenge stories for my two required critiques for the month of January. I'm happy to be caught up there!So that's why this post is decorated with my furry muse, Ari Cat. He crawled into my lap and laid

2010-01-18T10:31:00.003-05:00

Lone Tree5" x 7"Caran d'Ache Neocolor II watersoluble oil pastelsBlack Art Spectrum Colourfix sanded pastel paperPhoto reference by Bonnie "Artastic" on http://www.wetcanvas.com for January 15, 2010 Weekend Drawing Event.I've been taking it easy since the first of the year. The weather's turned bad for my arthritis so life's been low key and full of pain. Spring will be wonderful when it comes

2010-01-03T11:32:00.002-05:00

A Winter Fantasy5" x 7"Richeson hard pastels on Fresh Grey Art Spectrum Colourfix sanded pastel card.Photo reference by AlainJ on WetCanvas.com for the January 2010 Landscape Challenge.Yesterday, my new 120 color wood box set of Richeson semi-hard square pastels arrived. I was working on an ATC with pastel pencils and immediately switched to trying the new hard pastels, which were great. I went

2010-01-03T11:06:00.002-05:00

Lots to post since New Year's -- I completed my New Year's Resolution for 2009.That's sort of impressive, isn't it? Aren't New Year's Resolutions those things people virtuously decide to change in their lives and then screw up by February, going into an annual guilt trip over being fat, smoking, exercising too little or otherwise trying to change their bad habits?Well, due to some circumstances

2009-12-28T15:31:00.002-05:00

Rhiannon8" x 10"Pan PastelsSand color Art Spectrum ColourfixPainted from a reference photo I took with my phone and from life. Rhiannon is an eight week old Corgi puppy. We just got her a few days ago. Karl traded a tiling job on the breeder's bathroom for a purebred Corgi puppy.Kitten is a farrier -- a horse shoeing blacksmith. She's gotten Rhiannon to be her work dog and keep her company on

2009-12-28T12:22:00.002-05:00

A little catching up!Back on May 25th, we moved from Lawrence, Kansas to Russellville, Arkansas. The move was like leaving my arthritis behind, literally on the day of the move I was stronger every hour as we drove south. I love Arkansas. It's a beautiful climate.I've spent most of the summer settling in and getting unpacked. With chronic fatigue and mobility limits, the stuff that takes people

2009-12-28T12:07:00.003-05:00

Miss Gemini in the Window6 1/2" x 8 3/4"Cretacolor pastel pencils on Brown color ClaireFontaine PastelMat.Christmas present for my daughter Kitten, portrait of her cat. Miss Gemini has three or four different tortie patterns stitched together on a midseam. She's gorgeous but her markings are unique and difficult to get exactly right. I succeeded, this is actually Gemini and not just a cute

2009-04-14T02:09:00.004-04:00

Edit: Aha, got it! This is Flowering Trees in Washington State, watercolor, about 3 1/2" x 5" on the left half of a page in my watercolor journal done with Winsor & Newton Artist Field Box pan watercolors. Photo reference is posted on WetCanvas.com in the April 10 Weekend Drawing Event images thread hosted by WC member Elainepsq, who provided images from the Pacific Coast. Every weekend someone

2009-03-08T20:36:00.002-04:00

Sunfish is 6" x 8" in oil pastels on canvas paper. Painted from a Walter Foster book, How to Paint Wildlife Portraits in Oil Pastels, Oils and Acrylics by H. P. McLaughlin, I did it to illustrate my review of the book on www.explore-oil-pastels-with-robert-sloan.com, my oil pastels website.I started it in mid December and it's now got over 50 pages of product reviews, basic art instruction, oil

2009-02-01T11:18:00.007-05:00

Well, once again it's been a while since I blogged here. I have been working on my new website: www.explore-oil-pastels-with-robert-sloan.com and doing a lot more small format art, fewer ACEOs lately. I set up the first page in mid December and have been adding one to three pages every good day that I get. Ever since 2000 I have been planning to write an art instruction book. Last October, I

2008-08-22T02:07:00.003-04:00

ACEO Norwegian Forest Cat, watercolor, 2 1/2" x 3 1/2" listed for seven days on eBay. Painted from "Astonish Leaving" by wazabees, the brilliant Norwegian catographer and owner of Wazabees Cattery, who raised Astonish and eleven other young Norwegian Forest Cats. He's got his daddy Baltsar's odd eyes, but in the other direction.I've got a bigger update than today's art though!I'm working on

2008-06-25T00:16:00.003-04:00

It's been a long, long time since I posted here!I am not in Minnesota any more, haven't been for years. I left Minnesota in 2006. I got Social Security in summer 2005 and it's been renewed once, so I am not on the Endangered list of people who are disabled and can't work but don't have any resources either, any more. Yay for me. I have had surgery. I have had two years of recovering from my

2005-01-29T15:22:00.000-05:00

Well, the latest thing in my life is that I moved back to Minneapolis. I moved in with an old friend and her family and other housemates -- about half the people in the house are related, and it's a big house. It's very cool. I've now met all my housemates and neighbors in the building, even the busy ones who aren't around every day. I have seen the Great Library of SFF and my jaw dropped to the

2005-01-27T03:37:00.000-05:00

Wow, I didn't realize I still had this blog. Cool. I thought it was deleted for inactivity, but I guess not. That's very cool. Guess I'll update it now and then since I know it's still here. :)

2003-04-15T00:06:00.000-04:00

The Dvorak block broke down last night when I did another 2,000 words on Maker of the Houses of the Dead, -- erotic sword and sorcery for upcoming new ezine Strange Love. At my fastest point, I hit almost a thousand in an hour -- real close to a slow normal hour on QWERTY. And in a difficult genre. One that I will be doing a lot with soon -- after this one is done then I'm going back to Emperor

2003-04-10T20:54:00.000-04:00

Done and all taken care of. Sheets are back on the bed and all the books put up nicely in the crates that are doing service as bookshelves till I make a new bookcase. I really want to make a bookcase. I came up with a good design for a tall skinny one to maximize paperback space -- twelve inch shelves are just begging for double stacking, so I'm doing it with six inch wide boards. For the craft

2003-04-10T14:55:00.000-04:00

Oh great. This still gets so frustrating. I wanted to take a long soaking bath for my back and have clean sheets on the bed on the same day. Definitely a personal luxury given that making the bed is usually a major effort on my back and that I only got one set of sheets since the other set vanished in the move from New Orleans. Which means doing laundry and stripping bed same day. So I got into

2003-04-07T21:49:00.000-04:00

Doing a bit better on the Dvorak now. I only have to backspace every other word or so. Adults grouse about daylight savings time, especially now in the spring when you basically lose an hour of sleep. Reflect for a moment on how that seems to a five year old girl who did not understand that her mom couldn't repeal the whole thing. Then on what it's like to be a vulnerable male within earshot of

2003-04-04T11:07:00.000-05:00

Final count on March Madness -- 50,000 and change. The point that I hung up and did not manage to do one more word on Magic in the Streets without massive rumination was a natural break point -- a third of the way into the book. I chose not to worry about it. I was trying to do a three day novel -- and then two more within seven days. I hit my Nanowrimo pace and got a lot done. I am ahead of

2003-03-27T01:10:00.000-05:00

27,047 at end of Day Two of March Madness... This is woefully short of what I'd wanted to get done in two days. I should have been doing 17k a day, which means that's 7k short of the full count I ought to have had by midnight. I'm not writing as fast as I'd like to. I'm not managing to work around distractions well enough -- and one of the biggest is now struggling with the outline. I hit scenes

2003-03-26T02:31:00.000-05:00

March Madness! No, it's not a bunch of guys playing basketball around the clock for a week. It's the latest challenge at Forward Motion where a lot of writers pledged to any of six different levels of Marathon Writing for the last seven days of March. Whoohooo! Top level is to finish a novel of 40,000 words or more in those seven days. A few of us kicked that one to a whole new level, a sort of

2003-03-22T23:18:00.000-05:00

Oh now that's weird. My comments are all gone. I answered my comments last night -- good thing I did. Sorry I hadn't been updating as frequently, things got a little intense around here in Dallas for a while. Mostly with my taking time out to smell the roses and watch the kids and do laundry and slowly putter with putting my stuff away. It feels like pure luxury to be able to do that. I have

2003-03-22T05:15:00.000-05:00

Feline Postscript: I finally got to see Argent's Amazing Trick. Argent is a fluffy gray neutered tom, part Maine Coon though not quite in the size range of Coons. He has the Coon cheek fluffs like a lynx and a fluffy tail that got half-shaved down by the base last summer for a terrible flea infestation -- and so now has a half-floof tail that's short gray fur for the first four inches and then

2003-03-22T04:56:00.000-05:00

Oww owww owwwww.... Back's in a bit of pain tonight, well, actually a fair amount of it. But I have triumphed over my room. It's been a while since I moved into Texas. I got here -- got in safely, got settled, got taken care of wonderfully. Linnet took care of everything so solicitously that I felt just, loved. And this time I was organized for it. This time I still had all those plastic tubs

2003-02-26T19:49:00.000-05:00

Wanderlust... In addition to The Scarlet Queen, I've done the Forward Motion Dares -- and tucked in a last little Dare at the top of the week: to do four new short stories for Apprentice Short Story Dare by Friday. Yippeee! Last night did and posted the fourth of them. Three are "column" stories done in advance for Dstar's epublishing venture -- my job in Dallas is babysitting my godson and his

2003-02-19T21:50:00.000-05:00

The Scarlet Queen is my new WIP. "Dark" is good, but it's gone on hiatus due to major interruptions. I don't sweat it when that happens to good openers. They sit on my hard drive till I make time to finish them off, if the idea's good I'll pick it up again. I'm moving to Dallas, Texas. I've visited, but never lived there. I've got a job waiting for me that's live-in, taking care of my beloved

2003-02-12T18:33:00.000-05:00

Chazho is almost out the door. It's packaged, cover letter inside, addressed and sitting with another envelope for mailing out in Kitten's room, though looking at the clock it's likely to go in tomorrow's mail regardless of when she gets out the door now. I've critiqued 8 chapters of Stronger than the Night, Nonny's blockbuster creepy scary sexy beasts vampire novel. They go beyond vampires.

2003-02-07T02:13:00.000-05:00

meowbleah... Indigestion is not conducive to walloping word counts. Last night, over 6,000 words including two character bios for hero and heroine of "Dark." Tonight, a puny 624 so far, though I did rewrite my Vision article. Fried rice left over from a sweet and sour pork entree is usually great the day after. But not lately -- I've been alternating protein and carb meals to try to build up my

2003-02-05T21:49:00.000-05:00

Let's hear it for Evil Overlords! In my latest scene in "Dark" -- just completed -- MC Dylan has just won a titanic mage-battle against a relatively unarmed opponent, kicking over an Uneducated True of Heart Young Defender his own age. Dylan did it bloodlessly, didn't blow up the tower, did rape the boy's library and proved the point that overwhelming military superiority is -- overwhelming

2003-02-04T02:18:00.000-05:00

Monthly Marathon turned out all right, six scenes of something that just has the working title "Dark" -- and it's not set in Piarra. It's set in Treve. I'm not sure if my odd MC, Dylan, isn't a native Trevellian... right now I've got a lot of mysteries going for the reader and I'm back to that winging it bit of "keep going and when I get there all the clues will add up." This actually works. I've

2003-01-26T11:12:00.000-05:00

Site's down again. It crashed around three in the morning with bandwidth messages. That would be Forward Motion, where I usually camp instead of surfing. This morning I woke at 8:30 from having gone to sleep at an unreasonably early 3am, to see the Amazing Vomiting Cat attack my quilt project. My one and only completely handmade to be quilted like an antique quilt project. I made it with the

2003-01-26T01:31:00.000-05:00

Forward Motion has been back for some hours and I've had my third treatment bath. I'm feeling a lot better. This is the first one that's actually felt like a relaxation therapy. I was waiting for this point -- the point that what I was getting actually left me feeling better, not feeling weaker. Tired, but not sore. Not sleepy either, as I was last time. No energy but I'm used to that after the

2003-01-25T13:19:00.000-05:00

Forward Motion is still down along with the backup chat at N54. I slept 8 hours and hoped it would come up while I was sleeping. I'll try again during the day. Some community members are signed up for MSN Messenger. Last night Nicosian, Allikitten, Erik (Erik_Forbes), Nonny and I were using that as an alt.chat -- if you are in Forward Motion and want to try to pull chat together when N54 is

2003-01-25T03:54:00.000-05:00

Forward Motion's down... as if that never happens on Friday nights. N54 and the backup chat are down too -- the reason we left N54. Frustrating, but it's been known to happen and I guess this is the night of the ugly coincidence. It was far more common with N54 than Jatol. I'm almost done with Chazho, that line edit is ahead but the last time I worked on it I slammed nine chapters in a single

2003-01-23T02:49:00.000-05:00

Detox continues... and damn, I saw the spiders. Last thing I expected to see. Not a hallucination but just a nightmare that started before I was properly asleep. Maybe it's something biological to someone detoxifying to see spiders -- they are a warning "you are poisoned" as if I didn't know that from how I felt. Ugh. Shooting cramps in arms and legs, belly cramps, deep aches in all the usual

2003-01-22T13:38:00.000-05:00

Stress, planning and optimism -- I posted the earlier entry but realized I wanted to ruminate some more. Put up with me, that's why you enjoy this blog anyway. :D Health and chemistry observation: yesterday I tried to deal with being dehydrated by having only two cups of coffee and drinking a lot of iced tea and other liquids-not-coffee including Orange Mandarin tea that doesn't even have any

2003-01-22T10:08:00.000-05:00

Only a Horror Writer... would take his stupid sickroom experience with detox and try to not just overdramatize it and get melodramatic like any whiny sick person -- but actively turn it into the creepy version of Wild Kingdom as a nature observation. I posted a long entry on my LiveJournal: Detox 2: R for Disgusting. I won't repeat it here -- one reason I keep two blogs is that I put separate

2003-01-21T11:44:00.000-05:00

Relapse I'm sitting in bed to type instead of at the desk. Life went to pot after a 22 hour household meeting that was the spring cleaning of all grievances everyone had against everyone, which was necessary because tempers had soared to the point no one could contain them... and reminded me why I put up with all the logistic problems of living alone and what I lost when my health declined to

2003-01-10T14:58:00.000-05:00

Ack, bleep, expletive, hiss, snarl, ptui, hairball. There, I feel better. Finished chapter three of Vardishak's Road but took two days to do it since the day before yesterday, most of it was spent with a friend who visited-- and during the visit, my back went whang sproing, my *leg* went off and swelled again and every joint in my body started screaming between yellow and red alert. To the

2003-01-08T10:09:00.000-05:00

Rewriting Vardishak's Road now. That was my 3 Day Novel. I did about 6,000 words of background stuff and did fix up the Cycle, adding the hruntsa -- native big tusked critters including elephants, boars, horned things, anything big and nasty and herbivorous though there's a specific "hruntsa" animal I still have to draw to know exactly what it's like. On into turning 40,017 words into roughly

2003-01-05T14:20:00.000-05:00

Chazho Rewrite Done. Running total: 31,892 for the first five days of Year of the Rewrites. It still needs one last polishing line edit and proofread, plus two changes. One's cat hoovering: I need to tweak the Cycle one last time to punch up the boring Houses no one wants to play in the RPG that I don't usually write about, so they're fun and worth getting protagonists someday. The other is

2003-01-01T08:46:00.000-05:00

2003: Year of the Rewrites! I kicked off with a bang! Current total: 3,042 rewritten, which completed the rewrite of Chapter 37 on Chazho. Tricky, because I had to add as well as cut. I turned "telling" paragraphs into selected scenes with dialogue, then crunched the dialogue so hard it tightened. This went great. I'm getting better at it the farther I go... and Chazho will be a marketable

2002-12-24T12:20:00.000-05:00

Chazho pounds forward... Chapter 34 done. 4,267 words chopped down to 3,261 -- yep, this book is losing the equivalent of an entire short novel in verbiage and all the better for it! On a darker note, last night was the night for bloopers and I was careless enough to seriously impose on a very close friend. She knows who she is, I apologized privately -- and apologize again. I feel so stupid.

2002-12-23T09:02:00.000-05:00

Three-Quarters Milestone... What I wanted to learn from this rewrite, I'm getting it. I'm finally getting a feel for what to put in if I need to pad something to length, and what to take out if I'm trimming to length-- so that either way the piece is improved. From the time I was a kid, I considered that as one of the primary writing skills. Not the "rewrite for quality" but the dirt gritty

2002-12-22T08:42:00.000-05:00

Insane Goals Dept... Chapter 32 is finished, losing 1,001 words. I'm sticking to Word Watchers and watching the flab peel off of what's turning into what I thought it was when I wrote it - - a contemporary fantasy with a thriller's pace and a whipsaw plot that just doesn't quit. It now reads more like the thriller. The elbow room epic fantasy writers take with passive language and poetic

2002-12-20T06:15:00.000-05:00

Doubleheader! Chazho Rewrite is gaining momentum -- and best of all I'm getting in a nightly habit of rewriting. I'd added a chapter back in the Synopsized Sex Scene, figuring the hero and heroine finally getting together alone without religious taboos to stop them was worth its own chapter. Ever since, I've had to renumber and sweated at the thought of overwriting a night's work and having to

2002-12-18T00:33:00.000-05:00

Thank you, Allikat! PURRRRR!!! I just got my birthday present from my friend Allikat - a ceramic slice of birthday cake with a big 48 on it, a ball of twine and a quill in inkpot! COOL! And a plaque with the poem she wrote for me, which made me get all mushy again and I've put it flat in a SAFE place till it's daytime and I can bang nails into the wall to hang it. Somewhere NO CAT will knock it

2002-12-04T09:27:00.000-05:00

Time to post another blog! Last night, Brian the Dream Roommate, soon to be married to Ravyn on Dec. 21, helped me get my room clean. We got EVERYTHING put away. He "helped" by doing about 90% of the work, out of the goodness of his gentle, angelic heart. Brian is a Neat Freak of the very best sort - the kind who isn't resentful or critical, just likes DOING it and cheerfully asks if he can

2002-11-25T10:28:00.000-05:00

Monday, November 25. Nanowrimo word count 2,080 as of last night. Yeah. Five days, fifty thousand words, I am in sane. But I killed a nice sympathetic middle aged Hispanic lady in the first chapter, horribly, and there will be more to follow. I should post body count on top of word count. This book is fun! Robert and Ari >^..^< (He is feeling a lot better. He's sitting still where he should be

2002-11-20T15:46:00.000-05:00

Wow. Okay, well, it HAS been a while since I blogged. The great trek from New York to New Orleans was completed and there's a lot of stories. The biggest is that since I was already carrying a lot of cumulative injury and chronic fatigue, well, whooooops... Three days of travel take a lot of physical effort for anyone. Even the physically active and strong Lucas, Kitten and VandalHeart. What it

2002-10-25T01:56:00.000-04:00

Vigil has begun. I'm not staying online in chat at Forward Motion, I'm staying mostly offline and writing emails offline. Kitten42 and VandalHeart are on their way, and the phone's plugged in. No news is good news. It's only in the morning that I'll start getting telemarketers and other annoying people. It's Friday morning already for me, twenty to two. Very good time of night for getting some

2002-10-23T12:36:00.000-04:00

Slept about nine hours, interrupted of course by nightmares of the schoolyard. These, I know where they come from. If I ache all over and I am at the pit of my physical condition, the point where I'd collapse or bend over to pick up books and not be able to get up, then I'm vulnerable. I'm sometimes amazed I survived my childhood. In that regard, it was as ordinary as it gets. I will never know,

2002-10-19T09:24:00.000-04:00

this gets bizarre and annoying. My template, which used to load fine, doesn't load. They're always working on it, try again later, Error 503. I have no idea what's going wrong and I'm in over my head with that...

2002-10-19T09:23:00.000-04:00

(sneeze) This weather is not a good thing and neither is the stress. I'm moving, we knew that, today is packing. The apartment I'm leaving does not have adequate heat. It didn't last year when I first moved in, that it doesn't this year either is no great surprise. Chazho is done up through chapter 25 and that means there's a lot less ahead than behind. I feel like I'm getting out just in

2002-10-10T14:49:00.000-04:00

mew I've got the flu or the creeping crud or something that's going around and it's peculiar that a physical illness can jump across the Internet. A lot of my friends have it in different parts of the country. I got the Chazho rewrite up through Chapter 21 and then I wound up getting very sick and haven't got anything done. bleh. This is a bad thing. I know being generally run down contributes

2002-09-22T05:47:00.000-04:00

Okay... that's not too bad. Status of the move and the new plans... Switching gears is not an instant process between two Breakout type novels. It took me about a day of misery to get back onto Magic in the Streets and do my homework. I did it. It took me about two days after class to manage to get back in synch with Chazho. Ouch. It's a bit rough. I probably won't be doing much other new

2002-09-16T02:10:00.000-04:00

Dang that's wierd. My template's acting up again. Today's entry is 48 hours after a big personal decision. Cumulative rage at the levels of harassment, insult and sometimes active sabotage by assorted persons involved with caring for disabled people in NY State have finally boiled over - when combined with the equation of "the cost of living in Westchester County." Folks, y'all might remember

2002-09-09T13:40:00.000-04:00

Forward Motion is up again! And I got good news - my check from gothic.net was in the mail! Whooohoooo!!! I thought I had confidence before. This morning I was making plans, concrete sensible time management plans for getting it all together to make the leap. I've got inventory. Blitz on rewrites and I'm on my way here! Robert and Ari >^..^< (Yep, and I inspire him too! shed, shed, shed)

2002-09-09T07:05:00.000-04:00

Forward Motion is down today. The Crash Site is open and so is Chat - so if you got my blog bookmarked and you're wondering what happened to the community, it's Technical Difficulties. Exiting chat will take you to the Crash Board. They're getting right on them too, the folks at Jatol are VERY good about dealing with technical difficulties. I don't understand everything about it but they

2002-09-03T23:49:00.000-04:00

Vardishak's Road Three days. 40,017 words. I did it this year!!! Yes, I also slept for a really long time since midnight last night, like, it's almost midnight again. Okay, I pulled an all-nighter on the last day to do it. But I DID IT!!! WHEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!! Vardishak's Road - Zereldon of House Dzur entered the Heir Championship to defeat Rigan, who denied his human friend Sirara membership

2002-08-28T02:32:00.000-04:00

What's a blog without the occasional Online Personality Test? And isn't this one just so APT for me? I am anESSAY WRITER I like to take an analytical and objective approach to the subjects I write about. By telling the hard truth without any frills I make lots of enemies as well as lots of friends. I plead that I"m probably more than one writer though, since on several of those questions I

2002-08-27T19:15:00.000-04:00

Time is running out... is the day's Exercise at Forward Motion and I don't have a good short story idea for it. Yet. Because the feeling has been breathing down my throat since I started the Chazho Rewrite. I'm at chapter 9 in it. I am in the middle of Chapter 9 and last night I carved out a good 600 words of infodump, some of it just in a major swipe of the pointer. I am a much better writer

2002-08-14T16:19:00.000-04:00

Wal-Mart Expedition was basically to get a phone card. I lucked. They had them on sale in a three-pack, so I am now stocked up on phone cards. And also took care of a nagging, irritating, pointless frustration that I've lived with since I moved out of the shelter. I don't have room for a dish drain on the sink in this apartment. There just isn't room for it, the kitchen's that tiny. It's like a

2002-08-13T17:07:00.000-04:00

GeminiComputers.com rocks! Despite a little confusion with PayPal, where it persisted in listing my old address as Shipping Address, the Gemini Computers crew got my order out fast and well! Their sales department is staffed by human beings with brains. This is a rare and wonderful thing in a company. In most bureaucracies I've dealt with, a Shipping Address that was "official" and came from an

2002-08-12T20:00:00.000-04:00

Toshi's here and just in time! Ema, sweet, faithful Ema, my emachines etower 366i2, died... within hours after giving up the last of her files in a two day file suck and zip spree with my zipdrive. I got everything and procrastinated on copying over the Favorites links in IE. All my fiction zipped and archived the first day, with a few pictures. All art and pictures and side files and junk on

2002-08-09T17:17:00.000-04:00

Toshi's Here!!!!!! Sorry I didn't blog this yesterday afternoon when she came. She showed up EARLY - they said between four and six PM and she came at 3:30! I was outside the door to greet her. I looked, and there was the brown truck. Whoohoo! Went outside and yelled and cheered, waved my cane, pointed at the door, pointed at the sign and the driver laughed his head off. Got her inside and

2002-08-08T06:27:00.000-04:00

First Pro Sale One down, two to go. "Crossthought on the Hatestream" sold to gothic.net - at pro rates! Two more and I've made my goal. It's only a beginning... Toshi still isn't here. They tried again last night at 9pm when it was dark out - and didn't see the sign. Or the note was just that they handled it and decided to try today. Vigil again - with good news while I'm waiting!!!! Robert

2002-08-07T00:11:00.000-04:00

Toshi Sighting! Yes, Erik got a tracking number, and we found out the truth of what happened. UPS, which has made other deliveries to my apartment on the basis of Ground Right, apparently put a different driver on the job. They tried to deliver Toshi on Friday and posted "need apartment number." My building hasn't actually got apartment numbers. It's possible that with a 21 pound package, they

2002-08-06T11:46:00.000-04:00

arrgh Toshi still isn't here yet. Yes, it's the day after. I slept four hours last night, went to bed at two. Not getting a lot done, as I know I'm going to be changing direction real fast when the package with my laptop and network cables gets here. That hub moves files at 10mb a second. It will not take that long to suck all the files from Ema and set them up in Toshi's hard drive. At that

2002-08-05T19:07:00.000-04:00

Continued... In the heat of the afternoon, I did nap. Got in about three hours of sleep. A package came while I slept, but it wasn't UPS and wasn't Toshi. Last time the brown truck came at seven or even a little later, so now I'm just coming to the point they might be making those residential deliveries in the evening. All I slept through was the possible sight of the truck going the wrong way

2002-08-05T11:50:00.000-04:00

Polyamorous electronic perversity... Knights of old used to sit up all night on vigil thinking about their spirituality or who they wanted to whack or what they wanted to do with the damsels or whatever... now once again, I, the night creature spewing out way too many weird words, am on vigil. For the day. Drawing vampire bats in Gimp while looking at a weird colored planet with green fuzzy

2002-08-04T08:11:00.000-04:00

Sunday morning ... tearing into my homework, hitting the book over and over and pounding it till I get it right. I don't think I've ever made that many changes to something before I even hit page one on it. But it's interesting. I do not actually have a WIP at the moment in my usual state of "Heyyy wow, Chapter Next" linear writing. I've never prewritten this much. I'm doing a killer rewrite and

2002-07-29T16:08:00.000-04:00

The heat is on... one way and another. Scorcher again today. 92 inside Sonata and rising, three thirty in the afternoon. I went to bed about six in the morning after spending the night reading and answering crits on Chazho and meditating on the roots of Chazho. I have spent a lot of time working on the Editorial Hint. I don't know that I'd call it an Editorial Request when he says "Sure, send

2002-07-25T11:03:00.000-04:00

Raising the Stakes I'm raising the stakes on my BN book, even included and faced and dealt with my Personal Stakes. What's hanging on it if I sell Magic in the Streets and get a good advance, or even a great advance, what happens if I fail. That was the last blog. I need to clear my name. Lot of energy behind that. The gods must be laughing. Life raises stakes on Robert. If I didn't mention it

2002-07-20T04:37:00.000-04:00

Epilogue to a Long Blog Entry - Personal Stakes One of the things Donald Maass talked about in the energy running under a Breakout Novel is the personal stakes the author has in the book. What the book does to the author. What depths it digs out in him and how self honest the author has to get in order to get the novel right. That last entry showed me something about my BN project. I'm not just

2002-07-20T03:20:00.000-04:00

Looks like it's working... despite occasional problems with 503 errors when loading, at the moment it looks like Blogger's working right again. I hope so. I like doing this blog. Wrote a little private journal on Sonata, where it's not really accessible to anything. Just brainstorming a very painful recent writing block. Marc from BookMarc at thirdage.com said that "writers block" really

2002-07-17T17:51:00.000-04:00

Too Darn Hot -- temperatures are soaring again today and Sonata's temp is 92.8, which isn't a good thing and means it's hotter out in the room since her internal fans are going. This makes it hard to think or write coherently. It also leaves me wondering what I'd have done if I didn't have power or modern technology. The ugly answer to it is "died, of course." I hate being this weak. I hate not

2002-07-15T08:50:00.000-04:00

Monday morning. What am I doing awake on a Monday morning? Isn't that how the other people live, the ones who go out and do regular jobs with regular paychecks and live that kind of life? Or have kids who are going to school in regular schools? Me? Monday mornings? Okay, I slept last night. A really long time too, I got in about eight hours. I have been sleeping a full night every night and a

2002-07-13T04:55:00.000-04:00

Sigh. Four thirty in the morning and my back still hasn't quit. The price I have to pay to do anything that's important. I now need to give myself recovery time and make myself take it, accepting that the heavy first part of it is also going to slow down my writing. That's incredibly frustrating. Some things will change and some won't. There's no way around things like that unless I literally

2002-07-12T16:05:00.000-04:00

Site problems continue over at Forward Motion. I blew the Death Challenge and went over by six words on one post that was in the classroom area, response to a critique. I was also nerving myself up for Round Latest with the therapist, though the good news on that front is that it's been three months. That's long enough to document it. That's long enough to have it on record. It broke my heart

2002-07-09T07:00:00.000-04:00

Site Trek: The One With The Whales continues. What do whales have to do with it? Not much but it might be amusing to imagine a well known pro author in a bathrobe and a headband diving in a whale tank trying to filter out some intelligible content from all that gossip about krill... And in another universe, a few stragglers still can't get into Forward Motion but another feature of the movie I'm

2002-07-07T16:06:00.000-04:00

There's Cling-Ons Off The Starboard Bow - Scrape 'Em Off, FM! - Seems like FeaturePrice, the just for a month host for Forward Motion still thinks it's hosting the community, they tried to move the site back to their servers? This is causing interference for active and lurking members, some of whom still can't get in long after the point the DNS should have propagated. Errors and problems abound,

2002-07-06T10:47:00.000-04:00

Triumphal Site Trek Processional! Well, for most users anyway. DNS propagation has reached the majority of servers, a few stragglers are still circling the walls looking for the entrance and bouncing off the old Featureprice site. Most of us are in, the community's up and running at Forward Motion and the first page should say Jatol on it. If it says FeaturePrice, you're kinda stuck among the

2002-07-03T12:01:00.000-04:00

Site Trek Day Three: The Great Unpacking - DNS propagation finally reached Holly just as I was going to bed. Now she's up and setting up the community again in our new home. The mighty gates of Jatol open for the peculiar caravan of idiosyncratic writers, Word Warriors roaring up and down the line of robot cattle driving them in with their remote controls clicking. Ari the little cat in the

2002-07-03T04:54:00.000-04:00

New York Heat Wave It got bad yesterday, today. It went up to 95 or so with 105 degree heat index and once again my body proved that I just can't take extreme temperatures. I got sick. I'm still sick, it takes me a while to get over it and I've been doing alcohol rubs, sitting in front of one of the fans, soaking my feet in cold water, anything I can think of - and not getting anything done,

2002-07-02T23:32:00.000-04:00

Site Trek Faint lights glimmer on the horizon in the second night of Site Trek. Signals from Jatol are clearer and more frequent. Signals from the past are faint and few. The night is hot, the creaking joints of staggering robot cattle break the silence as their mottled sides jerk and heave in the manycolored bloglight. Not much longer, Ari. Shaggy and ragged, the little Siamese gunner flops in

2002-07-02T15:22:00.000-04:00

Thank you, sswain! You might notice SnorComments is gone completely now! One commenter, and it works! Whoohoo! This is great! N54 chat is in and out, but the crash chat is still up. 8 writers hanging out at the moment, shooting the breeze and banging out wordcount. I did another article today, this one for an easy crafts project "ideas to decorate your computer case" pretty much aimed at

2002-07-02T15:15:00.000-04:00

Testing...

2002-07-02T05:39:00.000-04:00

Chat's up! If you have the Forward Motion chat bookmarked as itself (I do) - it's up and N54 is done with maintenance. Dawn puts gray and purple streaks across the desolate landscape ahead of Site Trek... Robert and Ari >^..^< (We are Word Warriors! We got a cybermotorcycle with a kitty turret and I get to shoot gremlins while he drives!!!! KAZOT!)

2002-07-02T05:14:00.000-04:00

Update on Site Trek: I didn't follow up on that headline last entry, got sidetracked into venting about therapists who don't quite get the distinction between physical and emotional disabilities and mistake one for the other. Site Trek Continues Both links: http://hollylisle.com and http://www.hollylisle.com now lead to the temporary front page labeled Jatol - the new host. The DNS is

2002-07-02T03:16:00.000-04:00

Site Trek Continues from Forward Motion Got a lot done yesterday. Four nonfiction articles for the Dare in the first 12 hours of the Dare. Yeah. I was a little frustrated not writing. It didn't help that all my friends in the chat room at Forward Motion kept throwing Word Wars and throwing topics. One of them, I'm going to have to take the time one day to cut up a piece of leather and make a

2002-07-01T03:07:00.000-04:00

Save Early, Save Often The commenter didn't work in the edited template. Enetation didn't work without something I stripped out. So: FYI - the commenter on the LEFT is the good one, the one that says X is X'ed out and doesn't work. Hopefully just copy-pasting the old template in over the butchered one fixed... Robert and Ari >^..^< (I'm not scared of code! I know Kitten Code! I can wreck any

2002-07-01T03:04:00.000-04:00

Testing Without Snogcomments Hopefully this entry only has the functioning Enetation commenter. Robert and Ari >^..^< (He's so scared of code...)

2002-07-01T02:55:00.000-04:00

Forward Motion is Moving Forward! Heading off into the dusty electronic wilderness toward our new host, Holly put up a nice little temporary board at http://hollylisle.com with a couple of threads on it. Just to keep everything together as we make the long trek. Pictures are blooming again on posts, including my little orchids jpg, which I uploaded to N54 to finally be able to show it to people

2002-06-30T10:32:00.000-04:00

has been added to my side links. I was even able to find the spot where it goes! Very happy about that. The link to Forward Motion is going to work after the move too, I got a moment to check it and it should be all right. And we'll have little avatar pictures again! I've been making up 48x48 pixel artworks in Gimp to learn the tools and might find a way to post some of them here. They'll be

2002-06-30T10:25:00.000-04:00

enetation works! That's the enetation link they put on the signup page. I'm getting a look at how it comes out when the page is posted, and may put that in my side links if it's not screwed up. This commenter worked! And they have nice templates. I had a wide choice of styles. I've been a bit frustrated with my SnorComments because they don't work. I suspect I would get comments every now and

2002-06-30T02:25:00.000-04:00

Midnight Mixer Crashed by Cato "Boost Your Wordcount, Midnight Mixer" was supposed to be scheduled for midnight June 7 going till 2am Sunday. I found out it got listed for tonight instead at about two minutes to midnight. Hastily posted the class reminder and jumped into Classroom One. At least three times during the two hour class, chat crashed. Yikes! It was bad. It got rough, we only