What a hectic day...

The current writing project (the steampunk action/adventure story) hasn't come a long way since the other day, mostly because yesterday turned truly hectic and I didn't manage to squeeze in any lunchtime writing.

To start with, work (the paying job, that is, as opposed to writing work) got extremely busy. The systems that it's my job to maintain had been suffering from some problem that seemed to have all started sometime around last Thursday. From the look of things some kind of network glitch caused the data transfers between systems to get all gummed up, and it took a while to go through error logs and such to figure out what to do about it.

That in itself was only part of the day, though. I was working at home because we were expecting a nice new washing machine to be delivered (the old one having bust a gut). Just after ten the doorbell rang and two guys dragged the old machine out and put the new one in. Now, I'm fairly sure that the old machine is fixable so we gave Son #2 (who lives not far away) the option of taking it away and trying to get it going again. As such we now had a broken washer sitting in the driveway. Plan: move it into the garage until Son could collect it. Problem #1: our old car was in the way and needed to be moved forward a couple of feet. Problem #2: on trying to move the car, I found that it had a dead battery. I couldn't start the car or get it out of Park, so it wasn't going anywhere.

Now I had to go to the local Walmart and get a new battery. That was easy enough, but then I had to get the old battery off. Problem #3: battery is held in place with four nuts - two on the retainer clamp, then the two on the terminal posts. Three nuts came loose without too much trouble, but the one on the positive terminal wouldn't budge. And it's in such a tight spot that getting a wrench on there is tough. Try as I might I couldn't shift it with the wrench I had, mostly because I couldn't get the wrench into a good position what with all the other bits of car around it.

So it was back to Walmart to get a cheap socket set and a can of WD-40. Bear in mind that I'm still on the clock; I'm supposed to be watching email and working out what to do about the gummed-up data transfers, and here I am running around to change a battery so that I can move a car THREE GODDAMN FEET so that I can move a busted washing machine.

Returned home, applied WD-40, used new cheap socket. Success! The last nut was defeated. So I proceeded to lift the battery out and ran into Problem #4: there's a cable of some kind running across the space above the battery, and not enough clearance; and of course this twenty-odd pound lump of lead and acid has no place to get a firm grip. So I'm now trying to lift the battery out with my fingertips while simultaneously trying to nudge that damn cable to one side. If I ever meet the guy that designed that car...

After a few minutes I figured out that I could get the battery out by tilting up the far end and wiggling the thing out at an angle. Gravity helped when putting the new one in place, so that took only a minute, and after that there were no more problems. I put all the nuts and bolts back where they belonged and the car started first time (not too shabby considering it hadn't been started in months). I let the thing idle for a couple of minutes to get the oil moving, then I was able to move it and hence get the busted washing machine inside. Phew! All that just to do something that shouldn't have taken but two minutes.

I was able to get back to the paid work, which mostly meant making some phone calls and sending some emails to arrange to have those gummed-up systems shut down and restarted, and finding out that we weren't allowed to do that until 6pm. By that time my work day was over (except for the 6pm stuff) so I whizzed back to Walmart with the old battery so that it could be disposed of safely, picked up a few things then took care of a couple of errands including going to Sam's and grabbing a roast chicken for dinner.

5pm we had dinner; 6pm came, the servers got restarted, I ran a test to make sure that the data transfers were now ungummed (they were, thank goodness) and that was that. By that time I was so whacked that any thoughts of writing were swamped by thoughts of tea and rest. That was my day. How was yours?

As you can tell, I didn't have time to do any lunchtime writing (in fact I didn't even get any lunchtime lunch).

Well, anyway. Even though it's slow the work-in-progress is coming along. Current word count is just about 83,000; one protagonist is recovering from being shot, another has been captured by the bad guys, the third is attempting a rescue. Yet to come: big fight, then the wrap-up. I'm looking at a first-draft in the neighbourhood of 90K.

On other fronts: Pavonis sales are still flatlined, but to be honest I haven't had the time to do much in the way of marketing; and I'm still waiting to hear any word from Harper about whether they're interested in The Artemisia Chronicle. They said to allow three months, though, so there's plenty of time.

That's enough blog for today. Tune in next week, when I hope to be able to report much better progress on the work-in-progress and, you never know, perhaps even have some news from Harper.