Writing? What's that?

I tried to write today. Maybe it's just that I haven't been sleeping well recently, but I'm definitely under-par in terms of my productivity, both as a writer and as an engineer. I have so many good ideas, but none of the seem ready to get up and go anywhere, and it's been a real struggle every time I sit down in front of the keyboard. I wrote something like eight hundred words yesterday, then deleted them all, then wrote a new thousand words from a different character's point of view, all the time wondering if I can pull of my latest trick: take a character that's not terribly likeable, make the audience like him, then make him fall apart in a rather messy way, then put back together-- all from the point of view of another character.

Having Lain back for the past two days has been nice. I've been able to look over my works in progress and decide what do with them. There are so many scattered fragments, and I really have to get back into the groove and start doing 5,000 words a week, every week, no questions asked.

On a different subject, I tried installing the Linux 2.6.5 kernel on Lain. It did the one thing I couldn't get it to do under 2.6.1, which is suspend to ram and/or harddrive and recover normally. Yay. But now the mouse and the network card don't work. And I haven't even tried to get sound working. Obviously, there is work to be done.

Also, there's a new rev of Gentoo, which tempts me to try again.