My mom never faltered in her belief that I would be a published author. She believed strongly in my writing, encouraged me to follow my dreams. There were more than a few months over the past six years when the only way that we got from month to month was by the margin I added to the month’s income from my writing work. And this came to be enough for me. My mom felt that I had made it as a writer when my writing earned enough money to pay the bills.

Still, I wanted to be a published novelist and she encouraged me to reach for that star.

After she passed away, in late 2008, I let my dreams slowly get snuffed out under the pressure of others and other needs. I worked at writing, kept working to pay the bills, but the dream to be a published novelist was a lost dream for well over a year now.

I am no longer going to be afraid to pursue my dream, my mother’s dream. I am going back to the How to Think Sideways course that I was a part of when my mom passed away. The course that she encouraged me to take, and take it over from the beginning. As I work my way through that course I will use this website to track my progress and share my thoughts on writing.

I would like to offer the most heartfelt of thank yous to Holly Lisle, the course creator, for creating the course and for giving me a chance to return to it all these months later to work my way back through it and move toward my and my mother’s dream of me being a published writer.

It is a real shame, because I dearly love the little camera, it is one of the nicer digital cameras in appearance, weight balance, overall weight and ease of use while still giving good pictures that I have seen, but it is a battery hog that dislikes anything but fully charged batteries. And yes, I did set the battery type to the type of battery I am using in the camera.

Overall opinion: I am keeping the camera simply because it is a very nice camera that I paid less than half price for, but it is a backup secondary camera for kicking about on my ATV in the summertime, not my primary camera for everyday use or for use when I MUST be sure I will get pictures.

What happened is I went to one of my blogs and just by accident noticed that the title of the post did not match the title of the URL. Somehow I had posted a new post over top of a post that had already been made on the blog. This might not seem like too serious of an issue, until you take into consideration that I use my sites to keep track of what happens in a daily journal (sometimes a bit cryptic, but they tell a big story to those that know what to look for), and I earn income through sponsors. People that pay me a set price for an advertising link from my blog to their website. It was a sponsored post that had got overwritten. Eeeek!

That is not a good SNAFU, so now I am working with Windows Live Writer with an uneasy feeling that the program too easily might replace important posts about my life as a caregiver or sponsored posts. Anyone know of a plugin that lets me turn off any overwriting of posts that are already on the blog?

At least I think things have calmed down to the point that I can get back to work on my writing and my websites. I am sure my coauthor is breathing a sigh of relief – I just suddenly yelled “trouble here!” at her a couple weeks ago and dropped all work on the novel we’re writing. With any luck, by Monday I’ll be able to focus on it once again. Wish me luck.

Right at the end of the year I got a virus on my laptop, the first time I have ever had a truly nasty virus on one of my computers, which did a nasty number on the poor computer.  The damn thing took over the poor little laptop to the point that the computer could no longer do anything.  It would boot up, then just sit there and do some process over and over apparently, trying to figure out what it was up to, but never seeming to figure it out exactly.  I tried leaving it for a long time in that state, but it never seemed to catch up, so I started in safe mode and tried to work things out there.  No luck.  I could not get the computer to do anything.

I tried to get it to backup to last known good configuration, but it could not because one of the first things the virus did apparently was to erase all of my backup points!  I could not access the Internet, CD drive, thumb drives, printer… everything was locked up tight so there was no way I could save my information and no way I could get help from the Spybot forums in correcting the error.

Finally, with nothing left to do, I reset my poor little computer to the factory specifications and have been reloading my programs and everything since then.

I got the box from HP today via FedEx and am to ship it back to them with the computer in it.  They’ll fix the trouble and send me back my computer.  I’m going to see if they can also install a multi-monitor card while they have the thing – otherwise if I ever have another
problem with it then the thing won’t be configured right and it’ll just have this same old song and dance all over again.  With any luck they’ll be able to install a multi-monitor card for me and won’t charge me so much I can’t afford to have them install it.  We’ll just have to see though.  If they can, then I’ll be an HP convert rather than swearing them off entirely.

I tried again to get it to start up, it’s not gonna, so I called my brother.  With luck he knows something about it that I don’t and can save the poor thing for me.   He won’t be out here till this evening, so today, despite the fact I don’t like to, I am forced to use my little laptop like it was a desktop computer.  ::wince:: I know that burns the poor things out, but I really don’t have any choice, I have to get some work done.