run to the breakers

So I got my hands on the new cover art for Skeleton Army today, and personally I think it looks pretty great. Huge recommendation to the guy I hired to do it, Arthur Wang. Link to his elance page, which has some examples of his work. He was great to work with, and I think he ended up with a pretty good final product.

The title and name are just a mock-up and will probably end up different in the final version I sent to print

With October half over and National Novel Writing Month only a few weeks away, I added a new widget to the sidebar. Over the course of November it will track my progress as I write the sequel to Skeleton Army.

Watch in awe as I drop a novel in a month (and then spend the next six months making it worth actually reading.)

I found a fun tool called “library thing” which allows you to input and manage your library of books. I mean we all like to read, right?

To the right you can see I stuck a little script widget that will pull random books from my personal library, if you’re interested in what I’m reading (or what I’ve been reading.)  Check it out, you might like it.

edit: in interest of full disclosure, if anyone chooses to buy one of the fine fine books linked to the right I’ll earn a BIG BIG 4% of the sale at amazon.  I didn’t realize this at first and it was defaulted to librarything, but hey it’s my bandwith and a fellow needs to get paid.

So I got two puppies this summer, and ever since they’ve been engaged in a slow campaign of destroying everything I own. A little over a month ago they broke BOTH of my laptops by knocking them off end tables.  The HP has a busted hinge (which I guess isn’t all their fault, since apparently the hinges on that model are balls to begin with) and the mac… well, the mac was a nightmare.  It actually wouldn’t turn on, and I had to take the whole thing apart to get it working again.  It does, but it’s really touchy and the case is bent.

So with nanowrimo imminent and a pressing need to have an actual working laptop, I hit the streets and started doing some research.

Okay, so I hit google products and the internet in general, not the actual streets, but whatever.

What immediately jumped out at me were the many new ultra-portable “netbooks” that are starting to come out in force these days. Considering the fact that my puppies are likely to knock over any new laptop I get, the idea of a tiny, featherweight device with a SSD was suddenly VERY appealing to me.

The other thing that appealed to me was that a lot of them have a linux option, and while I haven’t really had any huge problems with Vista, I was really interested in the idea of trying out some flavor of Linux.

I wanted a particular model of the Acer Aspire One, but the exact one I wanted wasn’t available anywhere.  So I settled for my second choice - the Asus eeepc 900.  It doesn’t have as much storage as I wanted, the processor I wanted (pentium-m as opposed to the new atom), the battery I wanted (3 cell as opposed to 6 cell). But the differences are so small that I figured I’d go for this one and upgrade later, after they’ve had a chance to get even bigger SSDs, faster processors, bigger batteries, etc.

As it is, the Asus is a very solid little machine and I’m enjoying it a lot. It was a HUGE pain to kill the Xandros operating system it shipped with and actually get Ubuntu working right (with sound, wifi, mic, webcam, osd, etc all working properly.)  But in the process I’ve learned a lot about how linux works. I hadn’t used a terminal for ANYTHING in almost ten years, so it was a huge learning curve for me, but I managed to figure it out and I’ve now got the thing working perfectly.

my busted old hp had a tiny baby

Of course, today I got home from the store and discovered one of my puppies had chewed through the power cord of the new netbook to the point where it was shorting out.

Baby steps, I guess.  Baby steps.

A lot of stuff coming up real quickly: last week I hired an artist to do the cover art for Skeleton Army, today or tomorrow I’m sending off the manuscript to my editor for a run-through, couple weeks and nanowrimo will be upon us (and with it, the writing of the sequel to SA, Locks of Clay.)

Once the cover art is done I’ll probably throw up a little teaser, though I probably won’t FINALIZE the design until december. So far I like the guy I hired and I really like the direction he’s going with the art. Expect a strong recommendation at the end of the job, if things continue the way they’re going.

Looking forward to finally getting the manuscript to my editor too - can’t wait to get it back and get going on the next draft either.

And of course I’m chomping at the bit to get going on Locks of Clay.  I’ve got notes scattered across three different laptops, so I need to get them consolidated.  But so far I feel like this one will be light years better (at least in the first draft) than the first one.