Back of the Envelope

I spent a couple of hours yesterday trying to speed up my network drive's connection with my laptop. Here's what I've tried:

1. Changing the Wireless encryption.
2. Turning off Wireless encryption.
3. Turning off the Firewall.
4. Toggling protected mode (which is supposed to monitor for 802.11b interference, of which there's plenty around here).
5. 125 High Speed turbo mode
6. Frame Bursting turbo mode.
7. No turbo mode.
8. Different channels.
9. Wireless G only mode.
10. Turning off my anti-virus's resident shield.
11. Turning off my spysweeper software.

As far as I can tell, the max throughput I can get is 24 Mbps. On Sunday, I said I was getting 25 Mbps, but that was a slight exaggeration, as I was only getting about 20 Mbps with any regularity. By turning off encryption, my antivirus software, my spy sweeper software, and leaving on Frame Bursting and the Firewall and leaving off protected mode, on a channel separated by five from the other G networks around here, I pushed it to 24 Mbps. However, I ultimately decided to compromise on the Encryption, using 128-bit WEP at a cost of 6% speed and getting 22.5 Mbps. (WPA-PSK, which I had been using before, would have cost me another 6% and knocked me down to 21 Mbps.) It's still slower than I would have liked, but it is acceptable.

I didn't get much done this past weekend. It wasn't that I was lazy, just distracted. I decided to upgrade my network. I have a laptop and a desktop--the desktop is four years old, the laptop is two. I've upgraded the desktop--memory, video card, even processor--so it isn't as pathetic as its age suggests. However, both of them only have 40 GB hard drives, and I decided if I'm going to start putting videos on my iPod, I really need more space. (My iPod has 30 GB of memory, remember.) So I bought a Netgear SC101 Network Storage Device and two hard drives: one at 250 GB and one at 200 GB hard drives. The reason for that discrepancy is that I'm using 50 GB on one drive to back up the important files on both my computers (using the automatic backup software that came with the device), while I'm using the remaining 200 GB for storage of music, videos, and pictures--the space consuming portion of anybody's library. The other 200 GB disk drive mirrors the 200 GB partition on the first one. Thus I have two copies of everything, and I no longer have to rely on my sporadic manual copying in the case of a catastrophic hard drive failure.

My main concern with using network drives like this is whether they're fast enough. With my desktop, which has a 100 Mbps network card, I get a maximum transfer rate between the computer and the drive at 50 Mbps, which is reasonable. (It's only about half that when I write to, but not when I read from, the mirrored 200 GB.) For my laptop, well... in the course of this, I decided that I really needed to upgrade my wireless from a 802.11b to 802.11g network if I wanted to take advantage of this drive, so I did. It's definitely faster, but it doesn't quite live up to its potential, maxing out at a 25 Mbps transfer rate between the network drive and the laptop. I had hoped it could manage 50 Mbps. (Initially, I was getting a pathetic 5 Mbps, but I switched off the "125 High Speed Mode" on my Belkin Router, as that was, instead of increasing my wireless card's speed, preventing me from getting much throughput on the only application I needed it for.) In any case, the current performance is acceptable, but I'd dearly love to learn how to increase its speed by a multiple of two, especially from the laptop.

Incidentally, all this shopping hasn't set me back as much as you might think. Between a couple of rebates and coupons, most of which I didn't know about when I made the purchaces, I saved $110. That's a decent discount for over $400 worth of purchases.

Good news! I received my first rejection today. Yes, I did say "good news" and "rejection," and yes, those two do go together. I expect to be getting a lot of rejections, and of course I'd rather get an acceptance, but a quick rejection means that I can quickly get the story submitted elsewhere. What's more, it was an encouraging rejection, with a personal note from the editor with some comments both praising the work and explaining why it didn't make the cut. Vaguely, in both cases, I admit, but such comments are not only helpful, they do a lot to set the response apart from all those dull form letters I usually get. Because of that, I'm likely to submit more stories to that publication, including things I probably wouldn't have considered submitting anywhere. In fact, because of his cordiality in the past (this isn't the first work of mine he's rejected), I dared to ask him if he'd look at another story of mine, even though it's longer than the usual length of stories his magazine accepts. He's agreed, and after some polishing and reformatting, I should have it ready to send via snail mail this weekend. At the least, I should get another polite rejection.

And yes, I am being vague, since these were private e-mail conversations and I don't want to post them for the world to see.

All in all, I've made three submissions thus far, and I intend to make two more by the end of the week, for a total of five this month. Once those go out, that's all the material I have that's submittable, at least until I get my next rejection, and it's time to start revising Eyes.

Not for me, or for my blog, but I'm considering changing the names of one of my stories. I've always been a little uncertain about Eyes in the Shadow (read it here), and I've been thinking that Eyes of the Shadow might work better. For one, it's a more accurate name, as the focus of the story is on the red eyes of the shadow-thing. For another, it gets me away from the "Something in the Something" naming scheme that I've found myself using way too often. What do you think?

Well, I finally broke down and bought myself an iPod. I was going to get a Creative Zen Micro instead, which had 5 GB for ~$200. However, a friend was showing me her iPod, playing the movie Spiderman which she'd ripped from the DVD, and I decided I wanted one. At $300, with 30 GB and video, it's a nice toy. My main purpose for getting it isn't the video, though. I want to put audio books on it, and as those books usually take up 500 MB or so, I can fit a fairly decent library if I want to. I've been having fun with it, anyway.

On New Year's Day, I said that my resolution for this year was to get published. You may be wondering how I intend to do that. After all, I can submit all the stories I like to all the magazines I want, but there's no guarantee any of them will publish me, no matter how good I think I am. Yes, I realize that, but I do mean to aggressively seek publication this year, and to that end, I have a plan.

So here it is, Donald's twelve seven step plan to publish a story:

1. Get as many stories as possible into a publishable state. I have three stories which I think are in such a state right now, two of which you've seen and one which you haven't. I also plan to get Eyes in the Shadow into a publishable state, along with Fire and its sequel, by the end of the year. That in itself is pretty ambitious, and I'm not entirely certain that I'll succeed, much less have time for blogging and participating in the Storyblogging Carnival, but I intend to try.


2. Buy the Writer's Market. This volume lists magazine after magazine which accepts fiction submissions. I bought a copy on Monday.


3. Buy lots of 9x12 envelopes. I bought a hundred of them on Tuesday. I really only intended to buy, like, twenty, but the next size down from a hundred was about ten, which cost $2, and 100 cost $5, so I went with the hundred.


4. Prepare stories for submission ASAP. Preparing a story first involves checking out the magazine's website, reading some of its stories if possible, and making sure that the story I want to submit meets its submission guidelines. Then I have to write a cover letter and format the story to fit its requirements. This can take a while, but there's also a bit of re-use, first for submitting a story to multiple magazines, and then for submitting multiple stories to the same magazine. I plan on preparing three stories just this month, one each week--which gives me a week to spare.


5. Mail stories using those 9x12 envelopes as soon as they're prepared. I may wait until all three stories are ready, minimizing my trips to the post office.


6. Have as fast a turnaround on rejected stories as possible. It typically takes two or three months to find out if a magazine accepts a story, although one can be rejected within two weeks. The idea here is that when I receive a rejection--and I imagine all three stories will be rejected more than once--to have the story ready to submit to the next magazine and get it submitted within the week I get the rejection. Of course, if the previous magazine gives me useful feedback I may want to improve the story first, but useful feedback is pretty rare.


7. As more stories reach a publishable state, make inquiries/submit them as soon as possible. Both Eyes and Fire are novel length, so directly submitting them is not the correct process. For some smaller publishers which I think might be interested (Dark Cloud Press for Eyes), I may make direct inquiries. Otherwise, I need to find an agent.

So given that I have five stories to submit over the next year, how many submissions do I think I'll be able to make, i.e. how many chances to win? Well, there are a number of factors slowing me down. A two month reply time, the fact that most mags don't accept simultaneous submissions, and some magazines which only accept submissions during certain time periods, severely limits me. But then, there are a limited number of magazines which might be interested in my work anyway. For one of my stories, I've only found four magazines which might be appropriate, two of which I've already tried. For another one, I figure it might be appropriate for somewhere between five or seven magazines. The third one is more general, and I might be able to find dozens it'd work for, but I intend to enter it in a contest with a four month response time first. While I don't know whether I'll be able to get them published, I figure I can at least exhaust the possibilities for two of the stories.

Here are a couple of pictures I took while I was home with the family. Okay, only one of them was actually taken while I was home with the family. This first one was taken after I left, by my Mom with the camera I bought her:


That's my niece, Hope, with her kitten, Princess, and her grandfather, aka my father. Cute, huh? You can see that, as is typical of Louisiana Januaries, it's not quite chilly enough for a jacket.


There's my father reading "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" to my two nieces. I think they like it. That's my sister Rebekah with them.


This final photo is from the Atlanta airport. I was in kind of a hurry to get it, so it ended up blurred. What I'm photographing is actually a vending machine at the airport which sells iPods. No, seriously.