I am back after another hiatus and a laptop change

Two and a half months ago this blog, and my writing-oriented blog, From Both Sides of the Fence, went on what I thought at the time would be a permanent vacation. When this hiatus began, I was deep into participating in the 11th annual National Novel Writing Month contest (I won, as usual) and was struggling with an eight year old Sony laptop, and its arthritic keyboard.

Thanks entirely to a surprise offer from a relative in December, I have retired the Sony Vaio laptop, replacing it with a new Hewlett Packard Pavillion laptop. At the same time that I gained a larger screen and keyboard, this changeover also allowed me to upgrade from Windows XP (32 bit) to 64 bit Windows 7 Professional.

I have never been much of a Microsoft booster. Still, with Windows 7, I feel like Microsoft finally has developed a Windows version that really works. For the first time, I feel like Windows is working for me, rather than against me. For the first time, perhaps ever, the Internet is a joy to use because it is so colorful and fast.

For the first time since I launched these blogs, I can finally see them the way other visitors to them do. I am quite pleased at the colorful appearances of both, appearances I previously could only guess at due to limitations in the older laptop.

So Random Musings is back in production, this time much more likely to stay that way.

Mea Culpa to my readers, but I’m back

I have been away from this blog for way too long. For my absence, I do apologize.

Earlier this year, I encountered an interesting discovery, and learned some valuable new insights about the nature of my creativity in the process. Unfortunately, this blog, as well as my other two blogs, suffered as a result.

In March I participated in the NaNoWriMo follow-up called the National Novel Editing Month (EdMo for short). The goal here is to invest 50 hours of editing activities on one fiction manuscript during the month. I reached that threshold on March 22. Thus I needed fewer days to win EdMo than I did WriMo last November. Since I had some month left, I set my own advanced target: 100 hours for the month. I met that personal goal by logging a total of 101.5 hours of editing activities by the time March ended.

A lot of people wonder: is EdMo harder to win than WriMo? Yes, it is in the sense that any form of editing requires a higher level of intellectual effort than writing. With the latter activity, words can initially be slung onto the page (or screen) as they arise in the mind, without regard to correctness of grammar or spelling. Editing, on the other hand, requires close attention to the rules of spelling as well as the rules of grammar in order to render what has been written intelligible by others.

On the spur of the moment, I decided to give Script Mania a try in April (goal: 100 pages of either a properly formatted stage, radio, screen or television script in 30 days.) Big mistake. In April, I totally flopped at script writing. In fact, I never succeeded in even getting started. To me, this is a clear indication that script writing is a form of writing that my intellect is not suited for. Prose, most certainly. Poetry, quite possibly. Scripts? Nope. Am I bothered? Nope.

However, for some reason, this discovery, coming on the heels of the success of March triggered a fiendish, protracted bout of writer’s block that began in April and is only now beginning to ease off. That it is easing off definitely feels like a huge relief. Now I can get back to blogging on something approaching a regular basis.