AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

I'm going to burn this manuscript, I swear. I've leapt over the writer's block and run headlong into rewriter's block. I've fallen into the narrative hole on page 380 and I can't get up.  In the meantime, Pete and I are going to rework a classic: instead of The Man In the Iron Mask, it will be The Cat in the Plastic Laundry Basket.

And for your daily dose of cute, the small child shows that "anime face" can attack at any time.

He can also do a killer Buddy Hackett impression. Or Lou Costello. He's versatile.

Oh, The Humanity

Well, it's been a horrid last couple of days here at Chez Hades. There was one real disaster, that in retrospect was not as big a disaster as it seemed at the moment, but nevertheless demoralizing, and one barely avoided disaster that could have killed someone but didn't, but still freaked out everyone but me. I figure you should be thankful about barely avoided disasters and not focus on what would have happened had they actually occurred. In short, no one is dead.

I was supposed to have Running Red done before Sunday, and was actually on track to have it done Friday evening. At some point midday Friday, Word freaked out. It did so quietly and without fanfare. When I opened up my manuscript file, it had somehow reverted back to an unchanged file. A file sans revisions. Even though I had saved the file and double-checked it, 300+ pages of revisions were just gone. The file didn't disappear, it somehow REVERTED. And it didn't just erase the changes from the last time I had opened the file, it reverted back to the original file from a week ago. A file that I had opened and closed multiple times. Apparently from my research this is an impossibility. It can't happen. There is no mechanism by which this can occur. So I am left with either a supernatural explanation or Secret Window, Secret Garden scenario in which I did this in a fugue state to sabotage myself.  I'll leave it up to you to choose which is more likely.

So we backed up all the Word files on an external drive (680 of them!) and uninstalled the apparently possessed version of Word and replaced it with Word 2010. Things seem to be normal now, but I'm taking no chances. I back up everything hourly to the cloud and a flash drive.

I started over because there was nothing else to do, but that means most of the revising I'm doing I'd already done multiple times over the past several weeks and I have now looked at the manuscript so much that it's starting to make no sense. It's Groundhog Day, but directed by Frederico Fellini after a meal of hallucinogenic toads and absinthe. I'm back up to chapter 31 out of 55, and it's going sloooooowly. And after I do the revisions, I've to proof it again. (I do have a second proofer going over it too, but I have trouble releasing control.)

Hopefully the next time I take a break to post, it will be to talk about the new project, the one that was supposed to start yesterday, and Running Red will have gone to the big formatting barn in the sky. In the meantime, there is this, which I found delightful. (Warning: if you are easily offended DO NOT PUSH PLAY. And don't say I did not warn you. Because I did. ).

Bad News/Good News

Novel update: Still looking to lose roughly 20,000 words. Realize that my parallel storyline needs rearranging. Wish that there was a function in Word where you could tell it what you wanted it to do, and it would actually do it without introducing 14 other formatting gremlins. (Hey, Word, why don't you be a dear and make every fucking indent uniform?)

Bad News? Short story rejection, boilerplate "Best of luck placing your story, blah, blah, blah." The spymobile has decided it now only features "air conditioning" instead of air conditioning. So either it need a new compressor or I can only drive it in Siberia. Also, backing up lights don't work, which can't be remedied by something as mundane as replacing a bulb, but entails using a secret map to find a faulty switch located somewhere in the recesses of the engine, a spot which can apparently unexpectedly change locations at will. Thanks, Volkswagen!

Good News? Kid #2 departs from Afghanistan sometime in the next 3 days, and will be back in sunny California, then home to visit sometime next month.  The new season of BBC's Being Human is very good, with the added surprise bonus of the most excellent Robson Green as a werewolf. Yayayayayay. You see, being a werewolf entails taking off your clothes, repeatedly. Also, found a nice bottle of Riesling in the bargain bin at the Winn-Dixie, which I plan on drinking if I ever finish this fucking rewrite.