Muddy the Waters

Our goal: To make things as hard as possible for the main character, the heroes, the good guys. And to make things easy for the bad guys, then figure a way to turn the tables.

Our Job: To throw roadblocks up where ever we can to prevent our characters getting what they need. Aw, that's character abuse, now isn't it? Yet it's our job as writers to keep the story believable. Our characters are, after all, ordinary people, depending on the genre, of course, and depending on the character's occupation.

Let's face it, adversity makes or breaks us, shows our strengths and weaknesses. Helps us to grow and change as we meet the challenges put before us. This is our goal for our heroes, and if it's done right, The reader gets the delicious anticipating of wondering how it'll be pulled off. How satisfying, too, when our heroes outsmart the villains, setting the stage for "Happily ever after." For the moment, at least.

Easier said than done. I struggle with this. I tend to want to smooth the way, rather than muddy the waters. I have a lot to do, I'm realizing. You know it's easier to write about doing it than to write it.

Blowing Off Steam

I bought a little Samsung netbook to take on trips. Well, a netbook doesn't have a cd/dvd player so I was trying to network it with my notebook. I managed to screw up our wireless internet on all our computers. It took all morning to fix, though the solution was fairly easy. We just refreshed the router and recovered the netbook back to the previous checkpoint. My point is, nothing comes easy.

Nothing comes easy. Don't believe anything that says, "In just two or three clicks, you'll be able to . . ." Don't believe anything that says, "It's easy, all you have to do is . . ." Or, maybe it's just me.

Oh well, it's all good. I'm excited about the little netbook. It's got a 10.2 X 7 inch screen and it's as cute as can be. It's suppose to have a battery life of up to eight hours. I only got a couple of hours out of it this morning. So, again, it's going to be a process to figure out how to save the battery power. Fortunately, it came with a user's manual. Probably have to turn the screen down so low, I'll need nigh vision goggles to see it. But it weighs a little over two pounds and will fit in my next purse.

I wrote a couple of paragraphs of my book with the netbook just to see how it was. It was good. The keyboard is nice. I had to download a free copy of OpenOffice because I ran out of licenses for my Word program. Not sure what they'd do if I continued using it, if they'd even notice, but then there's the problem with uploading it onto Netbook. Since I couldn't get the two computer talking to each other, yet, I did the next best thing.

That's about all I have for now. Not much fun, but thanks for reading it anyway.