Blade Edge

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Howdy folks. In case you don’t know, this is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and I’m trying once again to pen a 50,000 word short novel. My last attempt was back in 2005. I skipped it last year and now I’m back at the drawing board. 2005 netted me a whopping 7 pages and 4,689 words. I think I stopped writing after like the first day. I’ve just finished my second writing session, so I’m already a step ahead from where I was last time, and I’m catching up fast with 4,552 words currently on paper over 13 pages. In this case though I have my document sized to paperback novel specifications. I’m surprised Word didn’t include a default layout for a mass-market paperback – I had to do some research to get the right sizing.

So what’s the novel about this time? Well I’m afraid I can’t tell you. What’s the title? Can’t tell you that either, because I haven’t picked one. Do I even know what I’m writing about? Vaguely. It’s all up in my head, and I’ve decided that that’s exactly where it’s going to stay. It’s amazing how much creativity you lose when you decide on a title from the get-go. It really does constrict you in the long run. Likewise, if the story idea remains in my head it’s completely malleable. As soon as I write something down however, it’s almost like being set in stone and changing it is very difficult. So if anyone else is trying this month as well, those are my two tips for you.

Well since you can’t find out ahead of time what the story is about, I guess you’ll just have to follow along as I write it! I can tell you it’s a suspense thriller/action adventure story, at least that’s a close description hopefully to the way it will turn out. I have the first chapter completed. I like the mechanic of opening the story at the climax, and then backing up and building back up to that point, and then continuing on to the conclusion. This opens up an interesting story technique where when I return to the climax, I can tell it from a different angle and hopefully reveal some surprising plot twists in the process.

Untitled Novel – Chapter One

I hope you enjoy, I’ve logged roughly 4 hours on it so far. Check out my Author Page for the latest updates, and if you’re participating this year let me know so we can buddy up!

BTW I have to write 1,667 words per day, so I’m already very nearly almost a day ahead of myself. Just got to keep up the pace….

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In other news, I was delayed for like 4 hours tonight when my computer got sick. I’m still not sure exactly what happened, but I was updating my video drivers and when I rebooted, the SMART test notified me that my secondary hard drive (that I used to store files I didn’t need quick access to so as to keep the Raptor drive free of clutter) was close to failure. After pressing F1 to continue the boot Windows loaded up and a dialog popped up informing me that MOM had failed to initialize something or other. MOM is a part of the ATI display drivers. When I tried to access my ATI display control panel, the same error popped up. I took a moment to load SpeedFan to run a SMART test on my failing hard drive again and it showed me the fitness level was near zero. But first I wanted to fix my video drivers so I reinstalled them and when I restarted the computer, nothing happened. The monitors stayed blank and my HDD access light remained on.

So I let it sit for a few minutes – read a book… came back and switched it off. Went back to reading for about an hour (got some snackage too) then came back hoping it was a heat issue (tho SpeedFan also reported a case temp of only 40c) and tried turning on the computer again. Still nothing. Then I realized I wasn’t even hearing the beep of a POST test. Great – did I somehow fry my motherboard??

So out comes the tower and I disassemble it and remove the offending hard drive, hoping that it was failing to read properly and just hanging up the boot process somehow. Tried again and still nothing. Pulled out the whole IDE cable and unhooked the one DVD-ROM drive I had hooked up and tried again. Still nothing. Replaced the failed drive with another I had in an external USB case and re-hooked the IDE cable. Still nothing.

Then I noticed when it would start a red light would flash on my Sapphire X1900 GT. That can’t be good right? So I hop on my laptop to search the internet and finally find that the red light is just an indicator that the card is receiving the proper voltage from the PSU (since it requires an extra power connector). Stupid ATI and their redness.

So my graphics card didn’t seem to be fried, but for some odd reason the computer failed to recognize it was plugged in. I took the bad hard drive and hooked it up to the USB case and plugged it into my laptop and got nothing – the drive didn’t even spin up when I turned it on. So perhaps the drive died in the middle of the reboot process and scrambled my driver install? Beats me, but I zip-locked it up and stuck it in the freezer anyways after researching the technique I had heard about before. Who knows, it doesn’t spin up but maybe being frozen will help.

Luckily I had my second ATI card in the other PCIx slot, so I pulled the X1900 and replaced it with the X1650 and booted up. The computer recognized the card and with relief I heard the POST beep. I loaded to the Windows welcome screen, shut down and then swapped the cards back to their proper slots and the machine started up just fine and dandy once again.

*phew* – disaster averted! I had to re-activate windows because of all the hardware changes but luckily that was hassle-free. I didn’t lose any vital data because I had done a backup yesterday. I did potentially lose some recorded TV shows, which would suck but wouldn’t be the end of the world. That’s what bit torrent is for after all 😛 We’ll see if the freezer trick works on my dead drive.

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Well I have a packed weekend ahead of me, which is why I’m still awake at 11am. Needed to make sure I can tackle this weekend without getting piled up on work. I think I deserve some rest right now, so I’m going to get going.

I picked up yet another Firefox tweak to further increase my screen real-estate, I’m going to post an entry detailing all the steps you can take to slim up FF, but that’ll have to wait for another day. Ciao for now.