I’m not even going to guess how long it’s been since I posted to this blog. It feels like forever. As with any long pause, I begin with the thought: So much has happened! Where do I begin?

I’ll begin with where I am right this instant:

I’m in my lovely office our log home in Northeastern Ontario (as seen above). I’ve just sent my Work-In-Process (Progress?) to a freelance editor. She’ll have it back to me in a week, so I have time off—time to attend to all the things I neglected in the mad-dash-crazy-scramble to get something legible to send. Not easy!

My last post was written on November 3 of last year—my 75th birthday. I had just begun NaNoWriMo—and I’m happy to report that I did succeed in writing over 50,000 words that month (50,077, to be exact). I’ve now 93,000, but much of it is in outline, so something is going to have to give. YA novels shouldn’t be greater than 80,000, to give you some idea of the pickle I’m in.

Regarding said pickle, I sent this image in my covering letter to the editor:

How I got here

My life was upended in January, and now, six months later, I’m just starting to get my feet back on the ground. To fill you in, my husband had DVT (deep vein thrombosis), necessitating surgery and long hospital stays in Toronto. We left for our home up north just as Covid19 was ramping up. My husband is still wheelchair-bound but on the mend.

And I’m back at my desk. :-) At last.

A typical exercise in frustration

Note: The search for a photo for this post sent me down the usual rabbit hole, only to discover a warren of tunnels leading to other rabbit holes. Sound familiar? Here’s how it went for me this afternoon:

  1. My photos on my iPhone weren’t showing up on the Photos app on my MacBook Air. Why?
  2. Google “answers” did not help—the directions weren’t at all like what were on my screen, likely because my computer and operating system are sorely out of date.
  3. I was told I needed to update something or other, and so I tried. No luck.
  4. SO: I dug out a newer computer, a beautiful MacBook Pro which I’ve never used because I detest the feel of the keyboard. I thought I would check to see if the directions made sense on it (newer operating system and all).
  5. By this time I’d forgotten my original problem. Plus, I’d discovered new ones.The Safari bookmarks on the new computer weren’t syncing to those on the old, and the Scrivener file on the old wasn’t syncing with the new.
  6. And then, of course, the photo I’d originally been looking for turned out not to exist, so I decided to take a photo of the greatest addition to my writing life. Of course, that’s the moment when the greatest addition stopped working.

Problem 1: wrong mouse.

Problem 2: dead batteries in my wireless keyboard (that the greatest addition to my writing life requires).

Problem 3: the thread in the keyboard was impossible to secure without a proper screwdriver.

Problem 4: finding a proper screwdriver in this house isn’t easy.

Problem 5: Even with said proper screwdriver, it still wouldn’t work. Good thing I had another wireless keyboard. Batteries changed, properly threaded with proper screwdriver, but hey: the keyboard needed to be “paired” to the actual (old) computer before the greatest addition my writing life would smile for the camera.

Happily ever after

Ah, now all is forgiven. And HERE—ta da!—is the greatest addition to my writing life:

A monitor.

I kid you not. I can’t believe I’ve struggled all this time without one. I’ve been working on multiple Scrivener files on my little MacBook Air. Scrivener files are huge. (More on that later.)

BTW, I mentioned in my post last November, that figuring out the Tudor family tree was driving me batty. (I’ve run out of words for crazy in this post.) I finally resorted to using MacFamilyTree to help me figure everyone out—and it did. It also helped me understand why I had been going … ah? … berserk trying to sort it all out with post-its. The Tudor family trees are enormous, and most everyone is related to most everyone else.

But that’s enough for today. I’ve solved my puzzles by classifying them as insignificant. The power of words! I can move on.

Stay safe, stay healthy. Stay sane!