I still ‘enjoy’ the fallout that came with this month all messed up. (March 2015 — I’ll remember you forever. I will probably develop a fobia for the month of March now.) First, my schedule was wrecked by things well outside my control. I lost valuable time to do research to write good blog posts for the challenge, because after one thing was shifted to later dates, all others had to be moved as well, and there are priorities, like editing my book. So no April A-Z for me. Talk about planning a couple of months ahead. Ha! Still fucked up!
That’s two failed A-Z challenges in a row.
Tho I still want to do A-Z next year. I’m an idiot.
My other worry were my beta readers. I barely made it on schedule with them as well, so revisions are a priority during the time I could have written a couple more blog posts. Again, things well outside my control, with stuff planned since forever. Fuck this shit.
Now, if all this wasn’t enough, my carefully built coupled-atmosphere-ocean model — I’ve been working on it for a year or so — crashes my computer. I’m out of computing resources and I can’t tweak it any further. Even if I’d run it in parts. I hit a wall with my planet design here, so I’ll have to improvise from what I’ve learned in the process so far. Basically, back to pencils and spreadsheets. I love spreadsheets, but I love MATLAB even more. Yet I have no pretty data to feed the scripts. *Weeps blood*
Hey, I still have my new bike! It was a gift for my birthday this February.
(I have an urge to sell it for more PC parts to get my old machine up and running again.)
The good thing (which somehow outweighs all the bad stuff) is that I’m halfway through the first chapter of Rjg. Looks like it will be an exciting adventure to write. I’m currently reading a couple of books to keep my mind going. I came across them accidentally, while doing some research for my story’s copper mines. Those two books are The Substance of Civilization: Materials and Human History from the Stone Age to the Age of Silicon by Stephen L. Sass and Traces Of The Past: Unraveling The Secrets Of Archaeology Through Chemistry by Joseph B. Lambert. If there’s something about ancient technologies and materials science, it’s where you should go look for the answers. Pretty good reads. (Ok, I’m biased here, since I found something that pleases my reader’s eye. That happens very rarely.)
Oh well, back to work. The last of revisions and some heavy writing afterwards.
Sorry you won’t be in on A-Z, and that sucks about the computer! I have lost all of my original date for a project 3 TIMES before, so feel your pain.
I usually do backups, even if I change a word in my projects. But this issue is much worse. I can’t run my model at all now. I don’t have the suitable hardware to carry the load of all the computations. Also, the data amounts on the outputs would be much bigger than I anticipated. I don’t have the hard drive space to house it all. Unless I buy me a new PC with all the powerful innards… and I’m not exactly swimming in money piles here.
This month I will release the posts I wrote for the challenge. So there will be something to read here. The thing is, I have to start thinking what I will do the next year for the challenge. I have to start writing NOW to make sure nothing screws that up. It’s so hard for me to come up with themes. Writing fiction is easier. :o)