Damn. Chronic mad digitizer syndrome settles in..

Just a couple of days ago, I mentioned to Omaha that as much as loved my Palm m500, I truly did lust after her beautiful new E2. Well, it looks like I might have my wish after all, not that I really want to replace what has been the workhorse of my day-to-day existence. My Palm has developed Mad Digitizer Syndrome, and the drift is so bad that even a few minutes after a full reset I can't get it back on track. I'll try one of those auto-digi drivers this evening, but if that doesn't work, looks like I'm gonna be in the market for a new PDA after all.

Sigh. I really, really did not want this.

It's not blasphemy if you don't believe in it.

Stunning, hopefully, absolutely no one, at a summit of 57 Islamic Nations in Dakar, legal scholars have drafted a document calling for legal strategies to silence critics of Islam. Senegal President Abdoulaye Wade, apparently unfamiliar with this notion of "freedom of expression," said, "I don't think freedom of expression should mean freedom from blasphemy. There can be no freedom without limits."

Especially bizarre is this editorial which seems to imply that Muslims deserve the same laws protecting them from ridicule and blasphemy that the Jews already have in the United States.

Fine with me. Given that there are none. I mean, how alienated from reality can you be to write: "The [Western] world has moved on to implement Tocqueville's theocracy"? Tocqueville's theocracy‽ Those must be some excellent drugs, dude.

Gym progress

I was tragically naughty last week. I went to the gym on Monday, and kept telling myself I'd go again, and again, and somehow didn't go through the rest of the week. By Friday, my knee was killing me; hard to believe that if I miss just three or four days it'll act up again like that.

Went today. Pretty good workout. I don't seem to have lost ground, strength-wise, and my endurance was good. I forgot my MP3 player, so I had to suffer with other people's music, miserable as that was. Apparently no one wanted to watch the market go apeshit as all four TVs in the aerobics room were tuned to ESPN. After I did my five minute warmup I got outta there fast. There's only so much Tiger Woods, Brett Farve, and miscellaneous March Madness I can stand. Did PT on the knee and then did pushups, situps, the usual arms and abs stuff.

Lunch today is Omaha's wonderful corn, leek, and cauliflower chowder with crumbled bacon. Bacon makes everything better.

Meet the New Process, same as the Old Process (only bigger)

So, after reaching 27,000 words or so at the Rainforest Writer's thing, I fell off the wagon for a week (I mean, c'mon, it's only March 17th of the 70 Days of Sweat some kind of Nano-type thingy, but for 70 days (okay, they admit it's actually 77), ending May 16th, with the idea that you'll have an actual draft finished by then. I picked it back up and kept going, and I've hit 31,000 or so today, so I'm ahead of schedule.

I'm working my ass of on the first full draft of Caprice Starr and the Slums of Mars.. I have no idea how well I'm doing; as a mashup between classic Silver Era space opera, Mundane SF, and Singularity Pulp, it's going pretty well. I've gotten the heroine into one Hell of a fix. ( Spoilers! )

As for "Chase the protagonist up a tree, throw rocks at her, have lightning strike the tree and set fire to it, have freezing rain fall from above and wolves circle from below," I think I've got that part down. It's making it all fit together (and having something left over for the next five volumes) that I'm having problems with.

It's also becoming less a commentary and pastiche of Asimov, and more just a plain space opera in its own right. I just love the name, though: Caprice Starr kinda rolls off the tongue. She still needs more panache, more character of her own, more pluck, but she's finding it. Slowly but surely. And she's not a passive "things happen to her" protagonist, which is a common problem with novels.

But I've been good. I've gone two weeks without working on anything else. I'll finish this damn book, whether it's good or drafty or whatever, and then I'll be allowed to do shorts for three months, then three months on the second novel (probably not a Caprice book; I'm thinking something from fantasy; maybe Janae or Moon, Sun, Dragons or something), then I'll revise Caprice hard and whatever is left over will be revisions of the shorts from the previous month.

I'm trying to get more discipline in my writing. The first thing is finishing a novel, and not an episodic one like Sterlings.