What's Goin' On

Our Private Novel Writing Month has begun. Former students of f2k - a free writing course supported by Writers Village University (known as WVU) - have gotten together to write 50,000 words in 30 days. Yes, it's a copy of the famous National Novel Writing Month, known as NaNoWriMo. That's why we chose PriNoWriMo for our own endeavor.

Last May we did a heckuva job, and most of us hit 50,000 words or came darn close! One even blasted into the stratosphere with 102,000+! If you don't think that's a big deal, try it. My own start yesterday was interfered with something awful. How, you ask? (Well, you might have!) My AntiVirus program decided that it was corrupted. All of it! Recommendation? Uninstall and reinstall the program.

Easy, right? Not! By the time I turned off the monitor and went to bed - at 3AM - the uninstall of an attempted download and install of Micro$oft's OneCare, was still going on. Total time of benning messing with this, while grumbling, whining, and of course cursing quietly yet heartily: 6 hours. When I got up this morning - 6:44AM! Sheesh! - the uninstall had finally finished. So I bent to the task of trying to reinstall my Norton AV. This had refused to work last night.

I did a System Restore (benning bows to the Lords of System Restore, once again) and stuck in the CD. Once again the program said it was unable to install, but I hit the retry button - which I did three times last night, to no avail - and washed dishes and made coffee.

It worked! Cool Beans! Now to update the bloody thing, which took awhile, accompanied by the obligatory "You must restart your computer for ..." blah, blah, blahs. Right now Norton is scanning my computer while I write this post. I'd like to know just what the hell corrupted the entire bloody program! Grrrr! There are creeps out there with nothing better to do than create viruses, Worms, and all sorts of Nasties that hurt computer users. I hope they rot in Hell, I really do.

That scan will take a long while, so I'm going to ignore it for the time being and get back to writing. Last night's output amounted to a meager 1,200 words, but it opened my mind to some visuals that I wanted to find. It's in the middle of the novel, but it's important. Very. So inspiration is always welcome. Ask any writer.

And where have I been for the past week? Still fighting this crud - more than a cold, prolly bronchitis, which seems to be a staple for me - which makes me tired and lazy. (I confess! I am lazy!)But also working to get the latest f2k going. It's been completely remodeled, placed on a new server, and the programming is all new. Which means ... I dunno. It's mostly beyond me, but the founder asked me to take over for the last Mentor-In-Chief, and I said I would. Truth be told, I think it's going to be too much for me to handle. I doubt I can do it. But, by golly, I'm gonna try. I really love the f2k course. And if this is what it takes to get it back and get some eager writing students into it, then I'll do my best. But it does take time. After all, I have a lot of noodling to do to figure out what to do. And that means phone calls to the founder - up in North Carolina - and emails. Trying to remember what had been in the original and then the later editions, if you will, and getting it all set up.

Last session, which was my first as a Mentor, we had somewhere around 500 people register. That's a lot of writing students! And why not? It's free! And the Mentors are volunteers, folks who have taken the course themselves and gone on to join WVU as members, as well. At this point I have no idea how many of the previous Mentors will join us again. All of them, I hope! We need 'em to get this done. So I will crawl through my address book and send invites to 'em. Already, as I have been told, we have folks registering for f2k. It's not yet open, or ready to go, but folks are so eager to get in that they're registering without any idea of the start date. Wow!

So that's what I've been up to for the past week, Folks. I have been lazy and busy and my computer has been corrupted, and I've also gotten some writing done. Discipline, benning! Discipline!

If I don't get around to my blogging friends I hope they'll understand and know that I will be around soonest.

Write On!