My laptop is going in for repairs tomorrow. They say it will take up to ten days to fix, but I’m almost at the end of my warranty and thanks to some broken clips, my screen sits kind of cock-eyed. It’s hard to say goodbye even for a little while, but I’m biting the bullet. I'm keeping my hard drive with me, though…no matter what Atreyu the Dell service technician says. You don’t need my pictures and poetry to reattach the monitor, buddy.

Obviously that will affect my ability to write, but thanks to my good old-fashioned click drive, I’ll only be slowed down, not stopped.

Speaking of writing, I’ve been reading a lot about the correct way to write and revise and this is what I’ve been paging through:

Writer’s Digest (July/August 2011) urges me to use the “Geyser Approach to Revision,” and provides me with five steps to do so. A couple of pages later, there’s an article called “Make Your Tone Pitch-Perfect” with seven suggestions to keep in mind when writing and revising. A couple of pages later, I see “Revising Your Path to Publication” with four steps to follow. Those are only a few of the To Dos when working on my novel. If I flip open The Writer (July 2011), I can read “Fine-Tune Your Fiction,” “5 Steps to a Better Manuscript,” and “A Checklist for Improving Conflict,” each with their own lists of To Dos when writing or editing your work. If my math is correct, that means I need to complete approximately 144 rounds of edits and have at least 400 articles and short stories published before anyone will consider publishing my novel. Trying to get my first novel published without completing every one of these steps (while attending every available writers conference) is like…well…trying to use the bathroom without taking your pants off. You can do it, it’s just going to be messy.

(Blog off)