I am back after another hiatus, another NaNoWriMo win, and a laptop change

Two and a half months ago this blog, and my general blog, Random Musings, went on what I thought at the time would be a permanent vacation. When this hiatus began, I was deep into participating in the 11th annual National Novel Writing Month contest and was struggling with an eight year old Sony laptop, and its arthritic keyboard.

By the end of last November, I won the 11th annual National Novel Writing Month contest with a final word count a little over 70,000, a personal best. This year I took on the challenge of writing a romance novel for the first time. This is turning out to be a rewarding challenge. First, it is providing me valuable practice in developing a fragmentary major character description into a three dimensional, believable person. As the writing (and soon the rewriting) progresses, I am learning more about my own personality and motivations. Plus, my main characters are showing me the value of, and need for, reconciliation between family members.

Thanks entirely to a surprise offer from a relative in December, I have retired the Sony Vaio laptop, replacing it with a new Hewlett Packard Pavillion laptop. At the same time that I gained a larger screen and keyboard, this changeover also allowed me to upgrade from Windows XP (32 bit) to 64 bit Windows 7 Professional.

I have never been much of a Microsoft booster. Still, with Windows 7, Microsoft finally has a Windows version that really works. For the first time, I feel like Windows is working for me, rather than against me. For the first time the Internet is a joy to cruse because it is so colorful, and fast. My cable internet provider claims in their ads that their service is “90x faster than dial up.” Finally, I believe it.

So From Both Sides of the Fence is back in production, this time much more likely to stay that way.