Twelfth Night 2020 Notes

Alliterative, ain’t it? Clearing my psychic desk in time for the first normal week of the New Year.

I’m sure this is not the first year in memory since Christmas and New Year’s Day fell on a Wednesday, but this is the first such time I’ve ever seen so many people complaining about it. Yes, it does result in two weeks chopped in short halves. It also results in Twelfth Night/Epiphany falling on a Sunday. I realize mileage varies for all, but I see nothing but win here.

From yesterday, 4 January. Five hundred miles since 12 October. I liked how the 100 and 500 looked together.

The monthly Windows 10 update continues to be a test of one’s anger management. My 35-day postponement was up on New Year’s Day, and as I’d hoped to write for a little while past midnight, I elected to suffer the multiple downloads, in interminable installations, and the inevitable shut-downs of my machine from processor overheating. 

Although I cursed losing two hours of playtime on my rig for these stupid, useless updates, the miserable process went by as quickly as could be hoped, with my computer only shutting off once during the download process. (Why simple downloads should tax a processor so remains a mystery to me.) Remarkably, the entire download-and-install process left very little to clean up. Normally there would be multiple gigabytes to be swept from the system, and I wonder if someone at Redmond finally figured out that most people aren’t as assiduous as running Disk Cleanup as some, thereby filling and congesting their hard drives.

That the process is now self-cleaning is an improvement. As if to offset this rare “benefit” to an onerous process best done without, however, I noticed that this update wiped out every setting on everything on my machine, from my music player to my printer. Even the thumbnails of image files have been omitted for uploads, requiring one to find the icon in the upper right corner change them back. This doesn’t seem to have relieved any stress from my video card and monitor, though. Instead, my video card update seems to have crippled where my thumbnails do appear. I have to hit F5/Refresh to make the blurred and out-of-shape thumbnails come into focus. This has never happened before.

“Winter Sunset Through a Filthy Windshield.” It’s not as crazy cold as it can get here in the San Luis Valley but it’s enough.

This will be the first time in so-long-I’ve-forgotten that I’ve had to roll back drivers for a program. I know I’ve done it, it’s been ages, but here we are. As for the rest, I ‘m going to have to reacquaint myself with my machine and do some search-and-destroy. Until I can secure the funding for a Windows 7 license and I can lock down the machine, it’s all I can do. That, and stay on top of my backups. 

One of the biggest things to go down this season was my sudden, obsessive compulsion to straighten out this side of my office. Towards left is the original chimney to the house. For as long as we’ve been here, the wooden corner plaster guard was off. I went crazy with some glue and nails and got that thing back on. The place feels so much more whole now.

It’s as if, knowing I’m so close to finishing this crucial bridge chapter in my third novel, The Wrong Kind of Dead, I’m slowing down. I’m mere pages away, though, and it should be done by the end of this week. Note what I have so far in the lower left-hand corner, 121,629 words across 348 pages and growing:

This will be a very big, very solid, most action-packed adventure. Something that encouraged me this very day was seeing the trailer for a sequel to a popular science fiction/horror movie of the last few years. The movie was about a post-apocalypse Earth in which giant, spidery aliens have killed most of the human population. The aliens are blind, but very good at homing in on sound. No one could make any noise or the giant spiders would crash through the wall like Kool-Aid Man and eat them.

What was encouraging was the sequel dials the clock back to the most interesting part of any post-apocalypse, when the ordinary world begins unraveling, slowly at first, then all at once. It’s what I’ve invested several months and over 100 pages into, by way of telling the story of how Agnes met Elyssa, then came to Sister’s Keep to eventually meet the Dead Silencer. Even when you know what’s going to happen, it’s still a thrill to see how your favorite people learn to adapt to their rapidly worsening situations.

It’s also good to know you’re not the only one who’s figured something out.

For my latest published novel in the series. I’ve got to make a lot more like these.