Street Dunes

Beach Report: Since I did go out and ride this morning--squeezed the bicycle out between all the boxes and old dressers and stuff in the garage--I thought I'd begin here, because there was quite a wind last night.

This is not unusual. The wind blows a lot on our little island, and not always from the sea. In the winter, it comes from the north, which is landward. More northwest-ish, but still, north. Last night, this fierce wind came out of the south. And it blew the sand up over the seawall.

I had to ride through a little drift of sand to get up on the sidewalk by the Rainforest Cafe, and there was sand dusted all over their grass and flowers. The petunias in the streetside bed were more tan than pink, from all the sand on them.

On the beach, a pair of bulldozers were pushing the sand, which had been piled up to a foot below the top of the seawall (when it's usually 5 to 6 feet below), back into the water. And later, when I was driving back from the Radio Shack (Radio Shack has a waterfront store!) from picking up a new cable for my portable hard drive, the whole right-turn lane at our turn, by the Rainforest, was covered over with sand. And the big plastic garbage cans down on the beach (they're plastic because metal rusts overnight) had not only been turned over, but one of them had been turned completely upside down. That's some fierce wind.

So. That's the report from the water front. I didn't ride very far at all on my bicycle, because I hadn't ridden in over a week, and had become all feeble again, and because the wind was still pretty stiff. I'm going to have to keep up the bike riding, as well as get back out to walk in the warm water. My knees will thank me.

Oh, and the website is under construction. Not under redesign. It's still going to have the same self-made design as before because I do not have time to fool around with programs I barely know how to use. What I have done is switch my web server account to a different plan, which will ultimately be easier for me to use, but in the meantime requires me to re-upload everything, including the fiddly little bits like the roll-over sidebar buttons and such. Yes, I have an old-fashioned website. Because I did it myself and I don't have time to learn how to do the dropdown menu linky things... does it work? I think so, but then I'm the one who put it together. Maybe when I get paid for this new contract, I'll pay somebody else to design one for me...

The writing feels stalled out. Probably because it is. I spent last week revising and re-writing a whole big chunk of the story, and this week, I went back to New Blood and hunted up all the places where I'd explained the function of magic and marked them with those cute little flag Post-Its, because I got a set of them in the gift basket from the RWA chapter where I spoke a couple of weeks ago. So now I can go look up what I said about what in the previous book. I do wish that I hadn't said wizards could have animal familiars, but I did, and I don't think I can change that much of the story now. I didn't give out many of them, so maybe I can set it up that it's difficult to acquire a familiar... Conjurers have spirit familiars, sorcerers have human familiars, alchemists don't have familiars at all, and wizards have animal familiars, but it's tough to acquire one.

After all the marking of the magic, I typed in all the revised chunks so it would all be in the computer and I wouldn't have to do the jumping from insert to original and back again when it was cold. I wanted everything smooth and flowing and at least semi-organized before I went on. So now I have to start writing brand new, original stuff on Monday. I should have been doing it this past week, but I didn't, and I think it's good that I did what I did, but... I'm feeling very behind again. Ah well. I am up to page 92. That's not bad, actually... Okay, I don't feel so bad, now.

And I won't be able to do what I thought I could do this weekend. We've got to hit the road again, but it might not be as bad/busy as I thought. The college softball team is in the regional playoffs, and it all depends on how many games they win and/or lose as to whether we have to go to a game on Saturday or not. If there's a Saturday game, we'll leave straight from the ball game. If there isn't...I'm not sure when we'll leave town. But it ties up my weekend with a bunch of stuff I hadn't planned to do (like upload all the image files to the new web server). Oh well. You gotta do what you gotta do...