Braindump

Having iced coffee late-ish in the day is good for pinball and good for writing and good for blogging and good for cleaning out Google reader.

I have all but completely switched over to Google Chrome when I’m on my Windows machine at home. This makes me a bit sad because I rather like Firefox and I still use it on my PowerBook (which is out of commission right now because of a dead power supply, the third dead power supply, grr). But once they port Chrome to Mac I’ll probably use it there too. The thing about it is that it’s so simple, it’s like moving into a smallish apartment: you only bring with you the stuff you need and then you realize you need less than you thought you did and it makes your life better. I keep trying to make mental lists of things I miss about Firefox but they’re mostly bellsy whistles, like TwitterFox and FireFTP and Google Bookmarks integration (which I’m surprised aren’t synced but I suppose that will happen soon). The positive effect of having a browser that doesn't totally lock up and misbehave because of one bad page outweighs having plugins.

I also recently discovered mouse gestures, which are nice.

I've been reading the Graveyard Book, which is so very very good. To counteract its deleterious effect on my writing self-esteem I also grazed through a smattering of bad SF&F books at Barnes and Noble, this made me feel better. I did actually have a positive end in mind, rather than just putting others down to make myself feel better. I want to get a better feel for endings. I realize that I've started reading way more books and started writing way more stories than I've finished. That's why I get stuck in the middle, I simply don't have enough experience with the middles and ends of things. So I wrote a crappy, five-paragraph essay conclusion style last chapter. i.e, in the end, it all didn't seem so bad, and in conclusion. This was painful but apparently necessary because I figured out a couple story threads that I needed to weave and chapters I needed to write to get to anything like an ending. And of course I know that the ending won't be anything like what I wrote today but it at least gives me a direction, and at this point I'd rather be writing in the wrong direction than not writing at all.

Today Friend Bat perched low on the brick wall outside my Starbucks, here is his picture

I petted him very gently, he was soft. Then I washed my hands, not because bats are icky but because I was making drinks and I thought customers would probably appreciate clean hands on my part.

I also saw this today, which made me laugh, LOLSpeak auto ad!

To prove how ADD I am, I was almost distracted from finishing this by removing duplicate songs from my iPod.

One last thing, both of you reading this blog post should go out and purchase the new Enigma CD because it is deeply awesome.

Thanks!