I'm Back!

You may not have noticed it, but I was away for a day or so. Computer stuff.

I should be feeling really crappy because I spent money I don't have and can't afford on a new video card. To my credit I bought the cheapest possible one, but it was still a luxury. My old one died about six months ago and I'd been using the one built into the motherboard, but that one wouldn't let me play Pirates!, which I'd recently picked up. I need some diversions and was able to pick up one of those gray market versions with just the CD and no box or manual. It say "Only for sale in Thailand" but, thankfully, the game is in English.

Anyway, so I installed the card and got it to work with Windows(tm), which I use for games and writing. Then, when I was booting up my Internet-safe system (SuSE 9) I mistakenly hit return when it was discovering the new card and screwed up the graphical interface. It felt I should be running at a resolution my monitor doesn't support, so when I'd start X Windows the screen was black except for a helpful message from the monitor saying "mode not supported" or something like that.

After trying and plinking and editing and attempting to run the config utilities (which, also, tried to run under the non-supported settings) I finally found an old setting that worked and, well, here I am.

Then I changed that working setting and now have something that looks better than before. Nice, crisp text.

So last night and early this morning I was full of self-loathing. Not only because I was scared about having ruined my computer but unhappy with myself for spending money I can't afford to spend. This money thing, btw, goes back to last spring's plumbing disaster, which drove a stake into my financial future and my life.

Having only untested (and, thus, not yet failed) plans about how to fix the computer and get back online, I was pretty miserable. Then I got it to work and burst into happiness.

Now I'm back to just wondering what I should talk about...


Even the "good" parts of TRE need some editing and fixing. I hadn't realized how ... insidious my difficulties with POV are. Maybe I'm too sensitive to it now (and I've heard more than once that editors are much more concerned about it than readers are), but I see POV shifts all over the place now. Not big ones: those are easy to find! But my writing has many subtle ones, usually disquised as verbs.

Which is to say, I didn't write it from close in Brad's head and the text has a lot of "Ken worried" type things and other lines where the narrator (whoever the hell that is) points things out. I kind of like them, or what the narrator is pointing out, but I can see that they're jarring (especially to readers who are looking for that kind of thing).

Also, I made the error of looking, again, over a chapter on Telling in a "how to edit" book and I see I do that a lot. I mean, a real lot. Then I looked in my magic bag of how to fix writing and the only tool in there I could find was dialogue. I see a line like "Dick felt the table wouldn't work for the radio station" and suddenly it *has* to be brought out in conversation because I don't know how else to show it.

After moping about that for awhile and realizing I'm much better at discovering mistakes than I am in writing well, I tried to console myself by remembering the better writers have to be good tell-ers in addition to good show-ers, and also that it's not appropriate to show everything.

So now I'm debating, considering, how much telling to do. The thing is, telling is easy and serves to draw attention to the more important things that are shown. It's a pacing issue, a focus issue, and by telling some items I think the readers will be able to rest and then be more engaged by the parts that are told.