It’s been a bit of a hectic mess, the past four or five days. I’ve dealt with lots of work stuff. I’ve had my hard drive go tits up on me (which sounds much better than it really is, believe me). I’ve had some really, really great meals courtesy of my magic-mojo-lottery-winning-father-in-law. I’ve dealt with a dead car for my wife and, miraculously, a new car to take its place. I’ve seen fireworks and missed my damn kids, way off in California for far too long. And I’ve had a power outage.

And, basically, I didn’t write for five days.

But I got back into it tonight. My initial target date for the Third Draft has been blown like [really funny, dirty joke deleted].

But I made some progress tonight and, more to the point, I made it better.

And I did it all on a big, old ugly slab of a computer that shouldn’t even have the pride to start up, let alone keep me connected to things like Twitter and my Scrivener documents.

Did I mention that my hard drive died a few days ago?

Well, it did and it turns our that — in addition to rendering my laptop utterly useless — my backup drive appears to have been corrupted.

I started diagnostics and repairs at about nine this morning.

As of eight o’clock tonight, they were still running.

The crucial things haven’t been lost. That’s my new mantra.

But man is it fucking irritating.

Anyways . . . the technical problems have delayed the podcast of the novel. As soon as I can get the money to get my computer back up and running, I will kickstart that.

Stay tuned…

(By the way . . . .donations for the Help-T.M.-Fix-His-Hard-Drive-And-Finish-The-Damn-Novel fund are being accepted via PayPal. This probably makes more sense if you actually care.)