Patti O'Shea's Blog

One of the really nice thing about the online community is finding like-minded individuals to hang out with. I’ve always been a voracious reader–I’m betting I averaged 20-25 books a month there for a while–and finding people who read like I did was impossible. No one I knew read that much. In fact, I hardly knew anyone who even read romance. And To Be Read (TBR) piles? Forget about it. I thought I was some kind of mutant freak and I never told anyone I had about a dozen books piled on my bookshelves that I hadn’t read yet.

Then I entered a magical world known as the internet and there was a romance readers’ board. OMG! I found people who read the same books as I did. They read the same huge amount that I did. And they had TBR piles! I promptly gave up television so that I had time to talk books with all my new friends.

There was only one downside. Book recommendations. My TBR pile swelled alarmingly. It’s still alarming, only more so because I have a lot less time to read now than I ever had before.

But these are the women that introduced me to Linda Howard and Mackenzie’s Mountain, to Anne Stuart, Rachel Lee, and a host of other authors I hadn’t read before this. There were also a large number of authors in this community and they did online workshops for us. Free! I read and I learned.

The online community is also awesome for writers because we’re just not normal. It’s why we tend to congregate with each other. We talk about our characters as if they’re real people, and hey, I’ll be honest with you. My characters are real to me. It’s like we’re sharing a house while I’m working with them. When the story, revisions, edits, and galleys are done, they leave and it’s as if my best friends just moved to the other side of the country. It’s also why I like to reread my books–it’s a chance to visit with my h/h again.

We can get into grammar discussions like on the comma, the semi-colon, the colon, and the em-dash and go on forever quite happily. Normal people don’t find this interesting. ::shocked face::

Speaking for myself, I spend a lot of time in my head. TBH, I like the worlds I build much better than the real one. In my head, there’s justice and the people who deserve to win, do. The people who are bad guys or unpleasant or whatever also get what they deserve. My characters might have to keep working at it, but they do get a happy ending. The real world? Not so much.

Writers can also talk happily with each other for a really extended time about what’s the best way to kill a demon, to mate with a demon, to use magic in a fight, to capture the bad guy. I’ve seen authors’ eyes light up as we’ve brainstormed these kinds of things.

You can see why the internet helps everyone. Readers can find awesome book recommendations (although wow, the noise now is incredible compared to back when I found my first group) and writers can discuss punctuation without boring others comatose.

I reached a few milestones setting up the new laptop. 1. All of my email was transferred over–not quickly or easily since it required me to import them into Windows Live Mail before exporting them to Outlook 2007–but that’s done. And 2. my writing program is setup and ready to go. I was able to bring over my quick correct words (I use that a lot, including for character names, words I frequently typo, and for words I consistently misspell. There are a few of those, although once I enter them, I usually remember how to spell them. Go figure.) and I also transferred my custom dictionary. There are a lot of words in there, too. I couldn’t figure out a way to bring over my macros, but I only use three of those so I just recreated them.

There’s still a lot more to do, but the mission critical stuff is ready on the new laptop and so I spent Sunday night exploring my new program–OneNote 2007.

I’d heard good things about this program for a while, but it wasn’t packaged with the Office 2003 suite and I couldn’t see spending over $100 for it. This became my first new program that had to be checked out. I started with a video tutorial on integrating it with the Office 2007 of products including Outlook and just about found geek nirvana. When I ran through the getting started screens, I hit writer nirvana. This is going to be a huge help when it comes to research. I can cut and paste in parts of web pages!

How awesome is this???

This has been one of my major headaches. I’ve tried bookmarking the pages only to have some of them go defunct, including some tremendous resources that disappeared when Yahoo closed down their free website service. (Sorry, I can’t remember the name of it off hand.) I’ve tried printing the stuff out, but for some books the folder gets awfully thick and there have been times that I can’t locate the information a second time even if I highlighted the important stuff. I’ve lost track of the number of hours I’ve wasted combing through the same pages again and again trying to find the one fact I need. Saving the page to the hard drive also doesn’t work real well for me because unless I manage to name the page something that will ring memory bells, I can’t remember what’s what. It also junks up the hard drive of the computer and they slow down and get junked up fast enough as it is. And pasting into Word doesn’t work either because the formatting is always wonky and I find that so distracting that I can’t stand it.

The best part is you can search through all your notebooks from one location. That way I don’t have to remember exactly which tab/folder I saved something in, I just have to remember a key word. There’s also a tagging feature, but I didn’t explore that too deeply yet.

I’ve been thinking how I’m going to organize my first notebook and I decided one tab for each main character (not just the heroes and heroines), but beyond that? I’m not sure. Maybe one tab for each book in the series for story specific research info as well as a tab for research that would encompass all the books. I need to play around with this a little, but I think it’s going to be major cool!

Only issue? I don’t have complete functionality in the program because I have a 64 bit operating system on my laptop and it’s made for 32 bit. This is supposed to be fixed in the 2010 release, but it doesn’t help me now.

Yesterday, I got my new laptop. It was past time to replace my current one–it’s made it five years and is still running, but it’s so slow, I spent Saturday cursing it. The new Vaios had finally arrived in the store and it was time. I just forgot one, little thing: How long it takes to setup a Windows computer.

My last replacement was for the desktop computer and I switched to a Mac there. I literally took it out of the box, plugged it in, loaded a couple of programs and was good to go. No arduous setup required. I also bought a netbook this year, but since all I do with it is take it to work to write, I didn’t need to do much except load an antivirus program and my writing software. Again, no arduous setup required.

Now? Arduous setup is required.

I spent almost 5 hours last night on the project. I made recovery disks (that took forever), loaded the antivirus software, deleted the software I was never going to use, and then I started loading programs. This is the long, hard part because simply loading them isn’t enough. I have to get my preferences set, too. Let’s not even talk about the files I need to move. Or the website bookmarks I have. Or setting up the email program. I figure I’m about halfway on the major stuff, but when preferences are factored in, I’ll be at this for a long while longer.

I also want to figure out how to move my custom dictionary and my quick words in WordPerfect from my old computer to my new one. The idea of having to re-add each one makes me want to cry. I use both features constantly and probably have an enormous collection by now. I turned to Google for instructions, but I haven’t found anything yet that explains how to do this for the X3 version I’m running.

This, however, is a problem for another day. I’m going to stay focused on getting the big stuff loaded and setup and then hit the fine points.

So after a night with my new laptop what do I think?

My first thought was why the hell do MacBook Pros have to cost so much??? The idea of opening the box, taking the laptop out, and being good to go in less than an hour is sounding awfully appealing right now.

There are a few things I’m going to need to get used to on the new laptop. Because I wanted all the RAM I could afford, I ended up with a 16″ screen. Awesome, I thought. Until I got the laptop. There’s a number pad on the right. Again, awesome, right? Except that the touchpad is centered on the keyboard, which means it’s offcenter for the laptop as a whole. Guess who was running her finger over the wrong place? ::blush:: Repeatedly.

The other issue with the 16″ screen is the resolution is 1900x something. It’s hideous. Everything is tiny. I mean really tiny. I was able to increase the size of my Windows icons, but the icons in Firefox as well as the address bar remain teeny tiny. I hate it and I have good vision; I just had my eyes checked. It’s not a matter of needing reading glasses, it’s just that small. I tried to adjust the resolution, but then the screen didn’t go all the way to the edges of the monitor. I might have to Google this, too, and see if I can figure out some way to increase the resolution, but continue to use the entire screen space.

Luckily, this isn’t an issue for my writing software. I set that view to margin width and made the program window wide enough that the text is almost a little too big.

This laptop is running Windows 7 and I find it less intuitive than Vista. Yeah, I know. But once I turned all the crap off in Vista, I didn’t have any problems with it. Windows 7 will be fine once I get used to it and figure out where everything is–and once I turn all the crap off here, too. Yes, there is crap in 7. Every damn time I tried to load software it would warn me that a program wanted to make a change to my computer. I was like, yeah, I know, just shut up and load the damn thing. I also don’t really care for the appearance of the interface in 7. I think I can adjust that so that it suits me better, but that’s a project for later. Oh! And I don’t like pinning stuff to my bar on the bottom. I prefer the quick links on the right and the little tabs for the opened windows. I wonder if I can change that, too? Maybe once I get used to it…?

I also need to figure out if I can reconfigure Windows Explorer to look like the XP WE. I don’t like the new look at all because I can’t see everything as easily anymore. Maybe I’ll get used to it. But I don’t know. It seems like a lot of stuff I have to get used to and it’s making me just a touch crabby.

But the computer is faster. It’s quieter. My cursing had to do with Windows 7 and the resolution on the screen, not the laptop itself. I’m sure I’ll end up loving it, but right now, wow, well, I wish the MacBooks were like half the cost that they are.

In the past few weeks there’s been discussions on one of my author loops about getting data off of those old 5 inch floppy disks. You know, the big ones that look like coasters for a beer stein? Of course, since no one has those ginormous floppy drives any longer, getting the data off takes time and money.

I was feeling pretty smug as I listened to these discussions. All my work is still on my laptop–I just keep transferring it. With one exception. I’d moved Ravyn’s Flight to CD. This format discussion had me reloading all the files for my first book back on my computer.

And my smugness returned.

Until I started thinking about this new series idea and remembering a fragment of an idea I’d come up with years earlier. Of course, I couldn’t remember enough of it for the thing to be useful, but I could just look at the file

Um, yeah. You see, all these idea fragments were saved *only* to one of the small floppy disks. (I console myself with the fact that I never used big floppy disks.) Problem is my laptop with the small floppy drive died. My old desktop can still be fired up…if I have half an hour to kill while it boots.

That sound you heard? That was my smugness balloon being popped.

I ordered an external floppy drive that plugs in via USB, and when it arrives, I will be transferring everything off the small floppy disks onto my hard drive. Then it will be backed up by Carbonite (an automatic, off-site backup service) and all will be good.

I’ll also be slower to scoff at authors who don’t have all their data in a readable format. If this discussion hadn’t come up, in a few more years, it probably would be difficult to even find an external floppy drive and I’d be in the same position they’re in now. Technology moves fast, but word processing files are small and hard drives are large. From now on, everything goes on the hard drive and moves from system to system with me.