Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Word count: 2650
NaNo link of the day: The Internal Cliffhanger

Thanks to RJ, I now have a ghostly, RSS presence on LJ. You can add my blog to your friends list using the instructions on my syndicated account page. I guess it means just adding jemima_blog as a friend. RJ is using RSSify to turn her Blogger blog into a syndicated account as well, but if you just want the plain RSS, here’s RJ’s feed.

RSSify is a good solution to the lack of Blogger RSS feeds; I stumbled across it back when I found myRSS. Unfortunately, you need access to the blog template to use RSSify, so I couldn’t use it to get feeds. But if you’re a Blogger blogger and you want to provide a feed, it looks pretty simple. It only took RJ a couple of minutes to set up, and the result is a full entry feed with just some minor link problems that most users won’t notice.

I must, I must, I must catch up in NaNo.

Word count: 700

I have about 7,000 words to go, and NaNo ends with November at midnight Sunday, local time. I think I can make it. The novel won’t be a real novel by then, but it may be the bare skeleton of one. Word count is all that counts for NaNoWriMo. I’m looking forward to writing some post-November drabbles after it’s done.

Veronica thinks the President is an idiot for going to Iraq for Thanksgiving, but I think it was a cool thing to do. Nevertheless, I’m trying to resist making a joke about turkey pardons…there, I didn’t do it.

Word count: 2075
NaNo link of the day: Simenon

After my heavy activity yesterday of post-resignation political maneuvering, I needed to rearrange some scenes for better use of the ex-wife/adultery subplot. That meant rewriting so that things that happen in year two of the novel don’t get mentioned in the past tense in year one, and the like. My word count so far consists of paragraphs added in here and there while rereading, but I’m not done yet. I’m also still behind and running out of days.

So I procrastinated and watched “Show and Tell.” Now I’m working on a drabble. I’m too far behind on my Stargate drabbles; I can’t afford to let a good idea slip away.

Word count: 725

I forgot to blog again! My NaNo characters were busy doing things I never expected, like flouncing out of the Senate, and then I was dragged bodily into a chat, and I completely forgot to blog. I blame Seema…

Word count: 2250

Sorry, I was writing so hard I forgot to blog. So why don’t I have any real words to show for it? Well, my day at the library turned into a huge linguistics research fest rather than the intended big writing event. I may have to try some of the NaNo recommended coffeeshops instead. Fortunately I don’t have an Airport card so wireless goofing off is out of the question…

I am catching up slowly. I think I’m only 6,000 words behind or so.

Word count: 2875

I’ve forced myself back on the NaNo wagon and I’m slowly recovering from the huge wc (wordcount to you non-unix geeks) deficit I ran up last week. The secret to subplot, I’ve decided, is adding a sufficient quantity of low-grade bad-guys, and letting them plot little plots. Right now, My Hero’s semi-ex-wife is about to blackmail him over some accidental adultery.

I still have too many good guys running around. I could kill some off, but that’s not really in the spirit of my peaceful 30th century society…

Word count: 0

After a heroic push to catch up yesterday, I’ve dropped the NaNo ball again today. But the weekend compensates for a multitude of sins. I find it encouraging to creep up page by page in the NaNo rankings - my best page so far was 26, while normally I hover with the just-caught-up types around page 50. Seema’s on page 3. Go, Seema!

Word count: 2145 (100 of which was a Stargate drabble)
Helpful link of the day: Trackback for Beginners

My NetNewsWire demo expired, so I’ve downgraded to NetNewsWire Lite and am posting to the blog from the MovableType web interface again. Forty dollars was just too high a price to pay for the convenience of posting from NetNewsWire itself.

On the upgrade side, I’ve built a new Emacs that no longer crashes in Panther. I’ve also forced it to run ispell. I was getting a Searching for program: no such file or directory, ispell error, even though I had installed ispell with fink. Rather than try to figure out what path the Emacs shell process was using, I decided to put a symbolic link to ispell in /usr/bin: sudo ln -s /sw/bin/ispell. Presto!

Word count: 2000

Four new drabbles have been added to the Stargate fic page, and Jade’s award for Purple Comet and another interesting graphic are up on her page.

I’m still typing up a storm for NaNoWriMo, despite Rocky’s words of no nano. All I can say is that most writers need deadlines or they’d never get anything written. Procrastination is human nature, and NaNoWriMo is only a temporary antidote.

So I’ve finally backed up my home directories and (wisely, it turned out) my Apache configuration files and installed Panther. I just did the upgrade, not the archive and install option, and I customized it just to drop most of the printer drivers and foreign languages. They take up space better spent on educational videos.

The first odd thing Kitty did was pull up my first preferred keyboard in alphabetical order (Dvorak) rather than the one I’d been using before the upgrade (US). I caught on to that pretty quick and switched back. I played with Exposé and Mail, and configured my new Finder windows. Exposé was definitely worth the upgrade. I took a short stroll through Font Book, but my main concern has been Emacs. I can’t start NaNoWriMo without my text editor. Fortunately I’m outlining my novel with the free copy of OmniOutliner, so the situation isn’t quite desperate yet. (Note that OmniOutliner has an upgrade available for Panther.)

Rumor has it that Emacs’ pty bug is gone, which I think means that ispell and other spawned processes will now work from within the GUI version. (It was an OSX bug rather than an Emacs bug, and now Kitty is all better.) It would be much nicer if Emacs actually worked.

The trouble began the first time I tried to rebuild Emacs, probably because I’d forgotten to install the developer’s tools (now called Xcode). My old build of Emacs wouldn’t run, either. I also had trouble the second time, but that looks like it was a CVS problem. I managed to get everything out of CVS and and my last build compiled, though make install didn’t move Emacs.app to the Applications folder like I expected it to. You can’t have everything, especially not at 3 a.m. Now that I look at my emacs build at a reasonable hour of the morning, I find it crashes occasionally. Such is CVS, I guess.

The other thing I did last night was redo my Apache config files, which were moved to a backup spot in the upgrade. I’m wasn’t sure what had changed so I reinstalled Entropy PHP. I’m getting a [warn] module mod_php4.c is already added, skipping, which I can’t figure out, since there’s only one AddModule statement in the conf file. I hear that may mean I have the wrong Apache build installed, but I never touched it, really, Senator. Otherwise PHP seems to work.

Maybe I should have gone with Archive and Install after all…