dianaschnuth

I have a tendency to forget how much mental energy it takes to write a coherent blog entry. I’ll do other things I want to get done earlier in the evening, not realizing that, once it gets to that point in the late evening when my creative juices once flowed most freely, my brain and body now find themselves to be shutting down for the night.

I suppose I’ll just have to wait until tomorrow to tell the tale of this weekend’s fun times with Amy, and how I still lost 0.2 pounds this week, despite eating Korean and Ethiopian and Dim Sum and making multiple trips to Starbucks.

My plan had been to get a move-on with migrating my blog to my other server tonight. I’m planning an entire redesign, and am finally ready to sit down and do it.

My hosting provider had other plans.

Turns out that, somehow, I didn’t get the Past Due Notice that I’m *sure* they must have sent before charging me a late fee. So, when I tried every possible password combination to log into my Cpanel and nothing worked, I decided to log into the Members section of their site, where I discovered that my account had been suspended. I promptly PayPal-ed them my annual $85 for 5GB of webspace (plus a $9 late fee), then contacted Billing (via a support ticket, since they had no e-mail or other contact form on their site) to confirm that my payment had been received and that my account would be un-suspended.

To their credit, they responded within an hour and reactivated my account — while I was writing this blog entry, in fact. I was seriously considering whether I wanted to continue my business relationship with a company that doesn’t seem to notify its customers before suspending their accounts… but this is the first real issue I’ve had with them (besides their initial data entry error in calling me “Dina”), so I’m willing to stick with them for another year. After all, dianaschnuth.com has been hosted there for the past three years with no major snafus.

I hadn’t been planning to go off on my web hosting provider, though. I’d been planning to detail my project plan for the next couple of months.

November, as usual, is National Novel Writing Month. I’ve never “won,” meaning I’ve never successfully completed a 50,000-word novel in the month of November. I’ve never finished a 50,000-word novel at all. I have three unfinished novels, though: the first, started in 1999 (I think) and clocking in at 19,400 words, I haven’t touched since 2004, according to Windows. The second was my first real attempt at NaNoWriMo, back in 2005 — between my NaNo wordcount and subsequent additions, it’s up to 16,000 words, and hasn’t been touched (besides the story bible) since late 2006. The third was last year’s half-hearted attempt at NaNo, which only made it to 10,000 words, despite being a plot idea I’m particularly fond of.

I’m going to pick one of these to write on this November. Since I haven’t successfully completed NaNoWriMo with 50,000 words in 30 days, I’m not going to be invoking the Zokutou Clause by finishing a previous work and still claiming to be officially participating. See, the rules clearly state that all actual writing must be done within the month of November (of the current year) in order to qualify. So, technically, I’m not planning to do NaNo this year. I am, however, planning to devote much of my November to writing.

Which means I need to get my blog redesigned (or well on its way) in the next 2½ weeks. And then decide which story I want to finish this November.

Oh, yeah, and after that? I should really update my portfolio and resume.

Something tells me that the "S" in OSHA doesn’t stand for "spelling."

I see these all the damn time online. I suppose I shouldn’t be so continually surprised that professional organizations are apparently bereft of their copy editors in the rush to get news posted online. But typos in ads? This banner ad ran on CNN.com for several weeks before a corrected one appeared.

I’m such a stickler for typos anymore. I guess I always was, but I’m finding them even more lately. I just finished reading a trade paperback — a Sci-Fi Book Club printing, I believe, of The Dragonriders of Pern — that was embarrassingly rife with typographical errors. They’re like speed bumps; they take me right out of the story. I can’t fathom how a three-in-one book like that got published with so many typos. Don’t these companies have editors? Even for a reprint, mistakes happen, and I’d think there would be someone to catch them.

Simple errors like that can make or break a professional relationship, especially one so dependent upon the written word. Would you trust a newspaper that misspelled the word “missile”?

I think that being able to Twitter quick updates all day long is diverting my blog creativity. Well, maybe not my creativity so much as my desire. I mean, I still have plenty of topics to blog about. I have a list. But twittering quickies about how I feel or what I think about during the day is seeming to take the place of blogging. Which isn’t what I’d intended at all.

So, for those who subscribe to the RSS and don’t read my sidebar (wherein lies my twitter feed), here’s what I twittered today (in reverse order, of course):

• 19 days until Hawaii. 26 minutes ago
• Longest Friday EVAR. Because I had nothing to do and had to look busy at my desk. And it was beautiful outside. Now I am home. about 3 hours ago
• last.fm appears to be mainly unb0rked now. we’ll see when i go to scrobble today’s listenings… about 6 hours ago
• iPod just shuffled from the Beasties to Bonnie Tyler (Total Eclipse of the Heart). WTF? about 6 hours ago
• o noes! @wilw sez that last.fm asploded. well, their datacenter lost power, anyway. ungood – i’m addicted to tracking my listening habits. about 8 hours ago
• New live-action Speed Racer by the Wachowski bros looks sweet: http://tinyurl.com/6absre about 9 hours ago
• Still can’t concentrate on work. Doesn’t help that I’m waiting on someone else before I can actually do what I need to do. about 10 hours ago
• Can’t concentrate on work. Want to be outside! Argh! about 12 hours ago
• Just found out how to set Windows Movie Maker to widescreen mode. AFTER I already captured and uploaded the video wrong. Fix it after work. about 12 hours ago

See the fun crap I post all day? My tweets seem to be par for the course: mainly self-centered updates about the status of me, occasional interesting linkage, and random observations about life in general. Kind of like my blog, but shorter.

My 8th-grade English teacher, Mr. Jay Falls, signed my yearbook (or was it a comment on an essay of mine?) that, like a world-class athlete, a writer like me should practice every day. So, in honor of Mr. Falls and his wisdom, I’m going to make a concerted effort to write a blog entry every day, from now until I go to Hawaii (on May 7).

That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop twittering, though…

Edited to Add: Just for kicks, I Googled Mr. Falls to see if I could find out what he’s doing now. I think I found him… so I wrote him a “thanks for being a good teacher” e-mail. Am I a goober? I think I might be…