On Chymera, Michelle Bottorff pointed out that it looks like my interminable difficulties with Origami Souls may stem from the fact that I have a short-story-writing methodology that demonstrably works (at least to the point of completing short stories, whatever you may think of their quality) but haven't yet evolved one for novels. She says from rec.arts.sf.composition conversations it looks like most writers need different methodologies for the two lengths. After thinking it over, I think she may well be right.

Of course, the open-close parentheses/braces model* for quests, actually stolen from Alex Winbow's sage advice on how to keep track of same when coding (yay Dylan/LISP/Scheme!), has worked swimmingly for Mask and Glove, which is a quest fantasy. This does not help me with OS, because whatever else it used to be, it doesn't have much resembling questing in it, if anything. (It does feature lots of authorial sadism, but that's nothing new.) Or Clockwise Shadows. Or anything else. But it's a start, I suppose.

Continuing on the goal of accomplishing one vaguely-writing-related thing every day, no matter how small: typing up Mask and Glove from my gawdawful handwriting. And then continuing the thing. Even if Stevian has "what kind of character am I, anyway?" issues. This is what happens when you turn a character into a hart before giving him any chance to develop. Silly me. Well, completion before revision, or I'll never complete the thing.

Here's to hoping that the latest version of Mariner Write doesn't exhibit the annoying crash-if-you-print-with-more-than-one-file-open bug the last version was doing to me. I despise instability in a WP, but I can't afford M$ Word. Given the price, Mellel may be worth checking out; I tried it several versions back and it refused even to run on my system, but that may well have changed by now.

Meanwhile, a big thanks to Greg for helping Joe and me figure out how to do Windows (2000)-Mac (OS X) file-sharing. Joe's much bigger HD would beckon for document-backup purposes, except I have the sneaking suspicion that he's likelier to have his system come crashing down around him than mine is. (Just prejudice. But I have had excellent stability under OS X, as opposed to the occasional wonky crashes under OS 8.5, or watching my sister's WinME system need a reboot every two days.) I did burn backups two days ago, because these things are crucial in case of something going Very Wrong--I lost a 60,000 word novel (albeit a very bad one) to a HD crash in middle school--but we will definitely need to restock on CD-Rs. Truth to say, a 5GB FireWire drive might be a good investment, too, as my documents are far less than that, and I'm using less than 5GB HD space total. Do they even make 'em that small anymore?

* e.g. open one, open two, open three, close three, open four, open five, close five, close four,
close two, close one etc.:

( ( ( ) ( ( ) ) ) )

Basically, open quest one, open quest two, open quest three, resolve quest three but that causes its own problems which open quest four...and so on. If done properly, I suspect it could almost become recursive, although as with all recursion, you gotta make sure you eventually hit a base-case/boundary.