Back of the Envelope

As I'm sure I said elsewhere, I'm currently on vacation, visiting my family in Louisiana. It's been fun seeing them again. Of course, this has been something of a working vacation. One of the things I'm doing is writing. I'm almost done with the rewrite of Eyes, and it looks like I'll have little trouble passing the 80,000 word mark. It remains to be seen if I'm still at that point when I revise the rewrite and cut some of the extraneous parts (that section where Ryan's meeting Emily's parents seems like it needs some cutting). However, I've already been talking about the writing, so today I'm going to talk about the vacationing, complete with pictures. So, here it is, a tour of my parents' backyard. Yeah, that sounds even more boring when I write it than when I thought it. The thing is, my parents have been working on their yard for years, and their justifiably proud of the results, so I figure a few pictures won't hurt.



No yard is complete without a statue of a naked lady in it. I'm pretty sure I've shown a picture of this statue before, so I won't dwell on it, and instead focus on the pond in front of it.



The pond has two sections, with a waterfall in between, and some goldfish in the lower section.



I suppose you could put the fish in the upper section, but then they might go over the waterfall.

Beyond the pond is a bottle garden, where wine bottles are used as a fence.



And behind that is the pool. Beyond the pool lies the hot tub.



We also have a barn.



And horses.



These two horses are unimaginatively named Red and Blue. My family doesn't actually own the horses; we're just housing them.

So that's what my backyard looks like. Later, I'll post some pictures of my actual family.

My laptop died last night. Sort of. It's a really annoying sort of half-death that's driving me crazy. It began by flashing the blue screen of death in the middle of web browsing. I've tried numerous times to get it back up since. Often, the moment it starts up, the screen remains blank and the Num Lock key flashes, until it turns itself off. Sometimes it will boot up and reach the windows loading screen before dying, either seizing up or rebooting. Sometimes it will get to the windows log-in screen and freeze while I'm typing in my password. And on certain rare occasions, it will let me log in, and actually do some stuff before dying again.

Fortunately, when I bought my network drive earlier this year, I set up an automated back-up system, so I have back-ups on all my important files. Unfortunately, sometimes the computer gets confused and changes which network drive is assigned which drive letter, which in turn confuses the back-up software, which won't make back-ups. Everytime I reboot, which isn't that often since I usually just put the laptop in hibernation, there's a chance the drives will get switched again. As it turns out, the last time the back-up software actually did a back-up was Sunday, and I've done some significant work on Eyes since then. However, I was able to get the computer to boot up this morning, then log in and get the drives straightened out long enough to do a back-up. So all my data is safe.

For, oh, maybe twenty seconds last night, I thought about fixing my laptop. Then I reminded myself that at two years old it's outside the obsolescence cycle anyway, so instead I went online and ordered a new laptop. I should have it in a little over a week. Meanwhile, I'm going to have to use my desktop for everything. Ah well, it's time to upgrade some of the software on it anyway.

I've been writing a lot this past week, expanding on the story in Eyes to try to explain more about Ryan's father, the mysteries surrounding his disappearance, and what that means for Ryan. It does play into why Red-eyes is after him and Emily in the first place, but I'm being deliberately coy with that, although I'm thinking I'm saying enough that readers ought to be able to make some educated guesses. So far I've written about 4,000 words this week, on top of another 14,000 words I've written previously, for a total of 18,000 words added to Eyes, about 36% more than the original. I expect to write an additional 4,000 words by the end of the weekend, and there may be some more scenes to write after that. Not all of this is completely new material or new scenes. Some of it is just scenes getting longer from the rewrite. In all, I'd estimate about 12,000 words, or 67% are new scenes, the rest is from expansion on old scenes.

Of course, not all of it is going to be quite as fun as a new encounter with Red-eyes. What I wrote today ended up being more of an infodump than anything else. Lots and lots of facts and information, but not all that much storytelling. I find it fascinating, but I'm not sure my readers will. I'd hate to just tell you flat out what I'm writing, but here are a few of my online sources. I have offline sources as well.