My brain: “I can see… everything!”

Then once the lions were finished I went back to sleep to be woken up by gibbons at 5.30am. Yeah.

One of the upsides to the trip though? I got to feed the giraffes. Like this:

The aim was to get her to lick your face while you did that. Sadly (???) that did not happen.

Me: Can I get up now?
Them: Not yet! I’ve still got to draw your tail!
Me: My what?!

Note my batwings and the “bomb that is on fire and about to land on [my] head”.

Anyway I am finally back to working on Winterheart and thought I’d share a tiny bit from the first part, which was written at the start of November. I hope you enjoy it.

“The queen of the snow bees lives up in the clouds, the thick black ones like over there. Although sometimes she has a castle high on the mountains. From the sky, or from the mountain – wherever she is, it’s always very high up – she looks down at us and what we are doing, and she sends the little snow bees down to us to spy on us and report back so she can learn about us.”

By this time Kyle and Gabrielle were sitting on the window seat, where Annabelle had joined them; all three teenagers were listening in rapt attention, and even Beatrice was silent, humming no more.

“At night, during the winter, she comes down to earth and wanders the streets. She looks through the windows at all the happy families and all the sleeping children, and she envies us all.”

“Why’s that, Nan?” asked Annabelle.

“Because we are warm, and we are loved. Those are two things that she is denied thus she wants.”

• Snot. Ew.
• I cannot brain as my head is constantly aching.
• My body aches too.
• Cough cough cough.
• Snot. How many trees have I wasted?
• How many mornings have I woken up with a painfully dry tongue because I had to breathe through my mouth through the entire night?
• There are blisters on my tongue. How did that happen?
• Sniffle snort.
• Look at the pretty line of pills I have to take with each meal!
• Oh doctor, please take all my money.
• OH GOD THE SNOT, IT IS EVERYWHERE.

And this is my life at the moment. :/

• Had my birthday.
• Went to a funeral.
• Finished an assignment re-do.
• Learned that I passed all three courses I was doing, so am half-way through the diploma.
• Had big life-altering realisation/talk with my aunt which resulted in me…
• … applying for the teaching graduate diploma course.
• And being subsequently accepted into that course.

What I have not been doing though is much writing. This makes sense: I was halfway through NaNo when Nana got sick and then everything else took over. It has only been in the past week or so that I’ve begun to get my focus back.

And just with everything else, the new focus/realisation has been applied: I am focusing on Lionheart rewrites and trying not to succumb to shiny new idea syndrome.

Anyone know where a girl can get some discipline?

I was sitting at my computer, like I seem to be doing for the majority of my time these days, mindlessly searching. “Searching for what?” you might ask. Well, my answer is a pretty simple one.

“People.”

For a blogger, I think I’m both insulated and divided. I’m insulated because, well, I don’t “talk” (read: comment) to many other people, and other people don’t talk back. And I’m divided because I hang in three main groups, in three different places. I follow authors on my livejournal, book bloggers via On The Nightstand, and everyone else here at Catherine-Haines.com.

It’s an odd feeling, as sometimes I feel like I am at least two different people, if not three. And that all of them are very lonely. I/We all sit around and lurk on various places. I/We want to comment, but it’s hard to find something that I/we have something to say about.

And I know everyone hates really simple one-liners, those “love the layout!” comments that don’t match the entry. So it’s back to lurking once more.

That’s why I am writing this post. I know you have to give a little to get a little. What I want to get is communication, blogs to read and blogs to comment on, and I suppose communication is what I can offer to give back. But what I would like from you is a starting point.

Who do you follow, who do you read? Those who do know me, who do you think I should follow, that I might like?

This is not me apologising for not blogging, as this post has an actual point to it.

My laptop has used up another life, and it’s choking and gasping and, well, not doing anything, really. And after all of the problems I have had with it, I have finally had enough. Actually I had had enough long before now; it’s just taken me this long to save up enough for the parts to build my own PC. (We have decided to call it Torchwood)

So now I’m looking at Linux installs, since I don’t want to spend 150-200NZD on Windows (XP or Vista) with Windows 7 coming out in October. More specifically I am looking at Ubuntu and its many derivatives. Does anyone have any suggestions versions that would be good for someone who has used Windows most of her life, or ways to make the changeover easier?

Expect a lot of blog posts about my venture into Linux and building a PC in future. But don’t worry – there’s some more writing ones hidden up my sleeve. Especially now that I am working on Lionheart…

You get three guesses, and the first two don’t count.

Yeah, it’s being a pain in the rear again. This time my user profile is corrupt and I have had to set a new admin profile up. All my files are safe; this is just annoying, having to reset all the little things I had: Firefox addons, Thunderbird settings, bookmarks… all the little things like that.

It’s nothing too major in the grand scheme of things, but it’s still annoying. Only a smilie can properly show my feelings.

hnoes:

I am writing this from the family’s desktop, which only reminds me of how much I miss having a computer in my room, with all my programs and files and everything. I miss my firefox install, with its bookmarks and addons and British-English spellcheck.

Don’t worry if the laptop takes my novels with it: the most recent versions of Blood Bound are with my wonderful beta, and the beginning fragments of Bones and The Superhero Diaries can be pieced together from stuff I have in various emails/from my notebook. I will have to do some extra typing and re-do a few things, but it could have been far, far worse.

In a way, this is a good thing, as I have been wanting a new laptop for some time now. The bad side, on the other hand, is that I cannot afford a new laptop right now, and it will take me about a month until I have saved enough money for the replacement I have got my eye on. So I am trying to look on the bright side in the meantime: being online less will mean less online distractions, so I can write my novels by hand in my notebook; I have noticed that when I type things up online from handwritten notes things get expanded, and my word count increases. So hooray for that.

So don’t worry about me if I am not online as much as usual. I’m still around, still writing… and looking for things that I need to get rid of anyway, and figure how much they’d be worth on TradeMe. It seems that not only am I trying to trim the fat on my body, but everywhere else now, too.