10 February 2010

Slowly but surely, I'm getting to the end of the first draft of the book I've been working on. There are some gaping holes in the manuscript, things I did not write because I needed to have a better sense of how certain events would play out before addressing them, but by the end of the weekend I'm hoping I can go back and fill in those holes.

It's kind of like wood putty, but with words. Literary putty? Verbiage paste? Anti-white out?

Anyway, I'm getting there. But I've also been distracted by this:

New-to-me Macbook laptop. I wasn't in the market for a new laptop, the one I have works perfectly fine, but this used system came preloaded with all the software I need for the publishing side of my life, and I've been in need of some serious software upgrades for a long time now. The main platform I use for manuscript formatting, Pagemaker, I bought in 2001 and I think that was the last time Adobe released any version of Pagemaker. The year after that they moved to InDesign, but I've resisted all these years.

This little Mac (and man it is REALLY little...) has the newest InDesign on it, which gives me a chance to play with it and to see if I have any hope of figuring it out. It's also got the newest Photoshop, Illustrator, and a ton of other things. Office 2011...which I'm kind of liking more on the Mac than I do on Windows.

In any case, I might have finished the first draft this week if not for the Mac distraction...

Totally different thing...why the hell am I sitting here with The Real Housewives of New Jersey on? I mean, I'm just waiting for the noon news to come on, but really, I feel about 20 IQ points dumber for the 15 minutes I've been listening to it...