Breaking Silence

Eek! It's been over a month since I posted anything.

Today I joined Twitter, LinkedIn, and Second Life. I'm not sure if I'll get hooked on any of these, but they're all being used as tools in a conference I'm attending virtually for the day job, so I'm dipping my toes. We'll see how it goes.

In work-in-progress news, I got a couple of very nice warm fuzzies from folks who read my partial draft over the holidays. It's always nice to get that positive feedback. I've written two chapters in the last month, which isn't all that much, but it's much better than nothing. I also found an awful lot of things to put in the "for revision once I finish the first draft" pile. If I don't deviate from the current plan, I have five chapters left to write. Yippee for the home stretch!

I've also been reading up a storm ...
A few weeks ago, one of the blogs I follow (not enough time to look up the post, sorry) posted a question: what book have you tried (and failed) to read? I responded with George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. I had wanted to read them for some time, I tried twice over the holidays, and I just couldn't get past the second chapter. Well, I tried again. And didn't look up until I finished the 4th book, only to find out that the 5th is long overdue (sob!). Unfortunately, book four was predictably disappointing. I had been warned, and the author very kindly put an explanation into the end as to why this was, but we never saw my favorite characters. I'm waiting on the edge of my seat for the next installment.

My quest to learn Java in order to code a platform-independent novelwriting application has hit a huge milestone as well: I feel comfortable with the language at this point, so now it's just a matter of putting the thing together. It's an incredibly large undertaking, so it'll be a while before I have a beta or any screenshots available, but it's progressing.

I think that catches the blog up to everything I've been doing since the last post. Phew!