Laptop!

New laptop is here and it's gorgeous! However I am at the "I hate you I hate you" stage. Two hours to find out how to turn on the backlit keyboard- yes the info is there, but it's listed under a different model only, and you have to know that first without being told.

Why the #*!! can't manufacturers write simple, down to nitty gritty manuals anymore? Is it because men don't read manuals and they don't write manuals for women???

Now re-installing software and data. Photoshop is up- the brand new CS5 Extended, and I am salivating, just thinking about it, But must get back to my story which is nearly done. But I have to have the software installed first.

Computer Failure! New One Coming

My NEW Dell Vostro 3500
in Lucerne RED!!!

Well, my trusty old Dell Vostro laptop finally gave out after four years. I could replace the motherboard, but the cost is about $175-$200 for the motherboard, assuming free labor. I've got my Baby, the MSI Wind U230 to tide me over, but while it's great for its intended purpose, coffee shop writing, it's hard on my  eyes for other things. So it's time to move up.

Only Dell offers the anti-glare screen I must have in a wide variety of models. I also really want a backlit keyboard for durability and the visibility- important for my screwball eyes. But finding my right combo at a good price was hard. I'm having to downgrade on hard drive size, but I work off back-up drives a lot anyway. I could replace it with my new 500 gb drive from the defunct machine, but there's that pesky warranty problem. And, silly thing that I am sometimes, I am actually paying extra for RED. But  you know how I love color.

If anyone I actually know who is close by wants a free motherboardless laptop, it's theirs. I loved this little workhorse and put a lot of money into upgrading and otherwise spoiling it so I'd love to see it get a new home. Possibly even talk son into doing an install for the nice person who will buy the motherboard. And no I will not guarantee anything. Not labor, not parts, not even whether this will continue to operate. It might not even be the motherboard that's at fault- could be the CPU or something else, even though it's most likely that. I'm simply not taking that responsibility.

I'll keep the new 500 gb hard drive as a backup drive, and re-install the original 120 gb, which had relatively little use. There's 4 gb of DDR2 memory, two batteries- a 9 cell in good shape and a 6 cell almost new. A new AC power cord and adapter, even a new keyboard and touchpad because I'm so hard on those. An anti-glare screen, of course. And Windows 7, recently installed, but I won't need. No Word, WordPerfect, Photoshop or that kind of stuff.

BLACK FRIDAY SALE!

In the spirit of Black Friday, the authors listed below agreed to participate by giving YOU, their fans, a great book to read for the Holiday Season. So act fast, this is a ONE DAY EVENT!!! Nov. 26, 2010
(HINT: Three of my four books are already available for 99 cents, and one should be soon. They will be at this price through the weekend, and longer if it looks like a good idea.)




Not all books have direct links to the books. Try the author website or Face Book page.


Participating authors:


Ashlynn Monroe
Blood and Bondage
Dark Miracle
Love Factory
Mirage
Or visit her website at http://ashlynnmonroe.com/
Facebook Page http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000491733108

Barbara Ellen Brink
Entangled
Or visit her Blogspot http://barbarasthinline.blogspot.com/
Facebook Page http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1441230489

Delle Jacobs
Fire Dance
His Majesty, the Prince of Toads
Loki's Daughters
The Mudlark
Or visit her website http://dellejacobs.com/
Facebook Page http://www.facebook.com/dellejacobs?v=info#!/dellejacobs?v=wall

Elizabeth Reyes
Forever Mine (The Moreno Brothers)
Or visit her Blogspot http://thebeginnings-elirey.blogspot.com/
Facebook Page http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1810909588

Jamie Debree
Tempest
Or visit her website at http://jamiedebree.com/ or http://www.brazensnakebooks.com/
Face Book Fan Page http://www.facebook.com/NovelistJamieDeBree

Jax Cassidy
Devil's Heart
Or visit her website http://jaxcassidy.com/
Facebook Page http://www.facebook.com/#!/jaxcassidy

Jenna Anderson
Healing Touch
Facebook Page http://www.facebook.com/#!/JennaScribbles?v=info

Jodi Langston
Always
Nature of the Beast
Facebook Page http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001589959287#!/profile.php?id=100000163137938

Valerie Maarten
Second Chances
The Gift of Joy
Or visit her website http://thewriteworld.webs.com/
Facebook Page http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001589959287#!/profile.php?id=100001589959287

Also available on Smashwords.com and Barnesandnoble.com (Nook) and Lulu.com

Now let's go fill up that Kindle and other ereaders....HAPPY READING

MOCK COVER MONDAY! : The Wrong Mistress

It's Mock Cover Monday again! This week: The Wrong Mistress.

Our beloved mythical author Alisse Davy has graciously agreed to do a Regency story, thus giving me opportunity to re-make Ruby With Chocolates (I'm still thinking of delicious stories to go with that one.)

Although a Regency heroine would never actually wear her hair down for a formal occasion, I didn't change it. That would involve re-painting her back as well as her hair, and although I could do that, I just didn't want to.

It got me to thinking, what woman would be wearing her hair down while in a formal evening dress, and still have a shawl draped over her shoulders? Perhaps a mistress? Have the pins just been pulled from her hair? There is no setting, so it could be in a house, an inn, even a private room of a ballroom. Perhaps on the terrace. How did she get there? What is going on between her and the unseen man?

I loved the authentic shawl which I stole from an 1815 fashion plate, by the way.

You might not like my title and have a better one you'd use. I see this as a Regency, but maybe you have other ideas. Play off what others have said, or write your own idea from scratch. Just invent a plot idea to go with this cover.

MOCK COVER MONDAY! Ruby With Chocolates

It's Mock Cover Monday! Today's mock cover is Ruby With Chocolates. It's not a real book, just a fairly generic cover design that's sort of suggestive of different directions. How do you think the story ought to go? Is Ruby a person? Is a genuine ruby involved? What's with the chocolate? Okay, so we know what's with chocolate, but how would you make it part of the story?

Or would you re-title it and write a completely different story?

The only other thing for sure is, it's a romance.

Go for it!

NaNoWriMo and Me

I'll probably finish this story

NaNoWriMo:
Na = National
No = Novel
Wri= Writing
Mo = Month

It happens every November. Multi-thousands of writers, pseudo-writers, hobby writers and never-before writers commit to concentrated effort to produce a 50,000 word novel entirely within the month. That's an average of 1,666.67words per day, or if you figure by page count at 250 words per page, 6.67 pages a day. Doesn't seem like much on the surface, but after the first few pages or week, your brain starts bogging down and it gets just plain hard. A pretty fair number of them succeed.

And whats the reward? You completed a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. You get a funny looking icon you can put on your website. And if you didn't resort to too much gibberish or pasting all your emails into the document, you do have something you might, with great effort be able to revise into a real novel.

In other words, bragging rights. And words on paper/screen.

Or maybe this one

The odd thing about it is, that's just exactly what most writers need now and then. It's kind of a crazy anonymous push in the behind that we pretend is real that gets us motivated. There's a whole world of people out there who thing writers just sit down and type and stories flow from them like water over Niagara Falls. They think we have it easy. We just sit there and type out our fantasies. In fact, somebody collected statistics once that showed 82% of the American adult population thinks they want to write a novel. And they believe they could do it better than most of the professional novelists out there. They just haven't had time yet.

Well, they can't. Unless they actually sit down and do what it takes. Those same stats show that of that 82%, less than 2% actually sit down and start a novel, in their entire lives. And of those, less than 1% complete it. Just imagine, then, how few of those go on to make writing novels a part-time or full-time career. Because writing a novel isn't a breeze. It's exceptionally hard work. And writing a good, sellable novel is even harder.

Most people do have great day dreams and fantasies. But those rarely make good novels because they lack dynamism. They're like strings of still photos, not the forward motion of action leading to consequence, evaluation leading to new action, etc. And the writing itself is something new writers think they can do, but often the clarity of their ideas doesn't make it from their brain to the paper. They see what's missing but the reader doesn't. These new writers are the apprentices, the interns, in a field where the journeymen and masters are still learning their craft, still exploring new challenges, still experience failure of their experiments throughout their careers. The process never stops.

This one's ready to start

What does this have to do with NaNoWriMo? NaNo is really set up for the amateur writer, so why would very experienced writers try to shoe-horn themselves into it? Well, like I said, it's hard, and often very discouraging. As one agent said, "In this field, rejection is the norm". An editor once told me she has piles of manuscripts sitting on her desk at any given time (now those piles are likely to be in her computer, but there are more of them), and she feels lucky if she finds even one manuscript with potential. She estimated she buys 1 in 600 that come across her desk. Those are really bad odds for writers. Often the stories we love the most are the ones we can't sell. We have winning streaks, then suddenly can't sell anything for years. Publishers stop buying exactly what we've just finished and mailed off to them the day it hits their desk. We have to be tough, and we are not. We're not supposed to take it all personally, but what is merely a paper manuscript to a publisher is our soul imprinted on paper. We're reduced to numbers, genres, and it's hard on us.

And follow with this one

But in November, beginning on the first day of the month, we shed some of that discouragement and aim for something different. Last year I started a story that I don't expect ever to sell. It's a story I want to write, that I don't think any editor will want to buy because it doesn't fit well anywhere. It's for me. Me alone. And taking the time to write it lifted my sagging spirits, as does aiming away from the publishing industry. Writing fast with not much care about quality can be very freeing. Write fast, clean up later. For me, that would be a bad habit if I did it regularly. But for NaNo, it perks me up, gets me excited again about creative writing.

Too bad there's no time for this one

Now, the truth: I break the rules. I don't start with a fresh new story on November 1. I'm often very deep into a story, possibly one that got stuck for some reason. I might work on more than one story, especially if I'm writing novellas which are only about 25,000 words long. Or, like last year, I might start, knowing I won't be able to finish for other reasons. And I don't write quite as freely because I don't like cleaning up messes. So I can't go as fast as some writers. But I figure what I'm doing is for me, so I see no reason why I can't make up my own rules. And if I reach the 50,000 words written fresh and new, I figure I won. And whatever I reach, I feel like a distance runner, exhausted but elated. And that's a whole different feeling that can carry me a long way through the next year when I have to face the tougher parts of this strange career.

So this year, in just a few more days, I will begin my own NaNoWriMo, doing it my way. I still haven't decided which book to finish- I could choose from two. Or I could pick one or two of my novellas that I have plotted out and pitch myself in that direction. And I will do my best to make my own goal of 1700-2000 words every day. I'll have dirty hair, unmade beds, lunch of cheese and crackers-- whatever it takes. I'll still feed the cats and kiss hubby, and get birthday presents off to all the November grandkids,all that stuff, sure. But mostly, I'll be a writing demon for 30 days of the year.

Part of me thinks it's too bad there's not more than one November in a year. The other part thinks, "Who are you kidding?"

A Most Unusual Man: Benoit Mandelbrot

Fantasy cover using a fractal dragon

A most unusual man has died.  Benoit Mandelbrot, age 85, a Polish immigrant who escaped Hitler's persecution, passed away of pancreatic cancer. You probably haven't heard of him unless you are very interested in advanced mathematics or geometry in nature. I wouldn't have known, myself, except that I had been wanting to post a blog about my fascination with fractals as art, and did a Google search to find a good definition. And there I saw the post that the man who had developed the concept had just died.

Fractal design from Czintos Odon
(umlauts on both O's in last name)

Mandelbrot did something that crossed the boundaries between art and science, bringing art to science and science to art. He discovered and explored the principle of fractals.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2370951,00.asp

I don't begin to claim any more than a basic understanding of his concepts. I'm like most people who have a preliminary grasp of repeatable patterns in nature and art. That's all. But I have admired the concept, and seen it flourish in popular imagination and art. I've used the (royalty free) designs of others in my own designs because I find the symmetry fascinating. It's like snowflakes, or fern leaves. It's a new kind of geometry that can be used to analyze or portray complex shapes that were previously thought to be unmeasurable, or too complex to be described by Euclidian, or what most of us know as high school Geometry. As near as I can figure, that means finding regularity in shapes that appear to be random.

Czintos Ödön

A butterfly designed from fractal
segments, artist unknown

Mandelbrot is said to have began working on his concept when he studied the Coastline of England, which, the more closely you measure it, the more it grows in length. Now, that, I understand. How can a coastline be measured, anyway? At what time of day do you go to make your measurements? High tide? Low Tide? And how high would high tide have to be? The more detailed you make your measurements, in and out of crevices and crannies, the longer the distance will become. Even if you only measured a portion for one hour, that distance would have changed during that hour.And you can't go back the next day at the same time to continue your work because the tides change every day.

fractal spiral design, artist unknown

True fractals are built of tinier fractals, so that if you magnify them, you can see even the lines are made up of the same repeated form. Magnify even 2,000 times, and you'll see them, theoretically in infinite magnification.

That's too much for me. It's all  an interesting conundrum, but I'd just as soon leave it as unexplainable, unmeasurable, for I'm not a mathematician. What I find fascinating is the effect this idea has had on computer-generated art.  Fractal-building software can now take a complex shape and repeat it, repeatedly, in varying sizes, to make a whole that has the same shape. Or in patterns to make other shapes. Or even more variations, perhaps combining different fractal patterns. In my artwork, I have kind of cheated, because I use Photoshop warping to turn the image into what I want it to be, and the repeated shapes are no longer identical except for size. I put them with other pictures, I paint on them. I make them different. But they still fascinate me even when I alter them. They fit wonderfully with my kind of fantasy.

So Thank you, Benoit Mandelbrot. Perhaps in my simplicity I mis-understand your deep concepts, but thank you anyway, for being a scientist/mathematician who had an artistic vision that has enriched my life.