Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Are the bears sleeping comfortably?

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I know all too well the February Funk I typically descend into each year.

You might not know it too well, because it involves me becoming a total shut-in for the entire month, totally cutting off all ties with the outside world – including blog ties. It is a special, wintry listlessness that let’s no ambition escape its grasp. The only thing that will sate it is missed rehearsals and hours of playing video games. It may cause me to  wear sweat pants for non-sweaty activities. It’s altogether terrifying.

This year I skipped it entirely.

Unlike an extra layer of blankets, you cannot kick of your accumulated fat when it gets too warm at night.

I’m still not sure how I accomplished that. Maybe it was the weather? Philly never endured any bitter cold this February and we skipped our seemingly-annual snowpocalypse. On the whole it was uncannily springlike. I wonder if hibernating animals were all terribly disoriented by it. Like, were all the bears all rolling around in their sleep, thinking, “I am too damned hot in all these layers of fat”?

Who knows?

Whatever the reason, the only funk to be found this February was from the awesome music I’ve been playing.

Okay, that’s a lie. I’ve never played a lick of funk music in my life, unless you count screaming James Brown back and forth with Gina between songs at rehearsal. GET ON THE GOOD FOOT.

The real way I stayed happy and healthy for the month was by vastly, vastly overcommitting – but, in a way that didn’t put the whole burden on my shoulders. That path leads to Funk. We doubled Arcati Crisis rehearsals. I began editing my book in earnest for Writer’s Club. I started a sort of tentative search committee around forming a new cover band, which I haven’t even talked about yet, along with other insane undiscussed developments – joining the board of a local org, editing a new blog, mixing two EPs for bands I love, planning to play and iPod DJ a wedding – the list goes on.

One thing all the activity has in common? No isolation. Even book editing has the end result of being in a room with other people, talking.

It worked! I made it through February alive and decidely unfunky. Suddenly, it is March and I’m free, free from the stultifying confines of the dastardly February Funk!

And I am booked every day and night for the next four weeks. Some days I don’t have enough time allotted for dinner or the possibility of needing to use the bathroom.

Hey, if that’s what it takes to skip February Funk, count me in. I’ll take March Mayhem, as long as it doesn’t lead to April Admittance-to-Hospital-due-to-Exhaustion.

Laptop Meltdown

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I had a plan of high efficiency for this past weekend. Novel-editing. Blog-writing. Track-mixing. Song-arranging.

Note a common theme: all my object-verbing centered around computing power, which made it the most awesome possible time for my laptop to have a complete meltdown.

So, of course, it had one. Followed soon thereafter by a complete productivity meltdown as I desperately shopped for a new laptop.

This image is a dramatization of the actual events of this past weekend.

Why do these things have to be so hard? My specifications, they are specific: Less than 13″ wide, less than 4lbs. More than a 2.3 GHz dual core. 8GB or more max RAM that’s user-installable. Not completely bloated with helpful programs I will never use. DVD-drive not required, but accepted. HD ideally replaceable with a solid-state version in a few months as prices come down. Under $1k. Bonus points for fun colors. Points lost for systemic issues pointed out by over a dozen one-star reviews on Amazon.

Okay, it’s not the simplest list of demands, but they’re a list! A very defined list. So why, why, WHY, was it an impossibility to find the laptop that fit? Shouldn’t there be entire websites – nay, entire cottage industries dedicated to solving this particular, very specific need of mine?

Well, there are. Sortof. There are cottage “laptop-to-spec” websites, but we’re talking >$2k for a custom-built laptop. They are for serious gamers and, like, Angelina Jolie in Hackers. CNET reviews every possible laptop, but the reviews are either immediately outdated or the laptop they endorse is nowhere to be found for sale.

(HP offers a pretty sweet set of customized builds on their website but, well – they’re HP. I’ve had several long-living PCs from HP, but there is no denying they are the king of bloat.)

The worst part? It’s not as though my laptop emergency came as a surprise, but even with a few weeks of prep time I was still paralyzed by dozens of shitty choices.

My battered blue netbook is now in year-three of its lifespan, and it has been through the wringer with me. I have worked with it in the crook of my arm on elevators and highways and in subway cars and rainstorms. Last year the original charger died, and it took three tries to find one that would work. A chunk of the faux-metal trim fell off, leaving a gaping hole in the front corner. Then my arrow keys stopping clacking, and removing them from the keyboard to try to solve the problem proved disastrous. The screen flickers dangerously any time my body accumulates the slightest bit of static charge. Sometimes it simply shuts off.

Still, it runs, it browses the internet, it edits my novel. What more did I need, really?

On Saturday, even more keys began to give up the ghost. The left-hand shift began randomly firing, creating CrAZEd SCreEds out of my every email. Then it died entirely (which was preferable), with the Backspace key seemingly next to follow. And, boy, let me tell you, if you are going to have one randomly-firing key, Backspace could be the worst possible option.

The result was about 36 hours of close to zero productivity as I cried about not being able to edit my novel and poked at seemingly every laptop spec on the entire internet. Should I cave and get a Mac Air like E, even though I find it unwieldy? Should I cave and get another super-cheap netbook for $300, even if it has the same exact specs as my three-year old version? Should I cave and build a custom HP that would take three weeks to arrive and at least another week to declutter?

As you read this post I am in possession of a brand new Toshiba Protégé R835-P94. CNET reviewed the series well and it fit all my requirements, though I had to hunt down the actual spec sheet to prove it. I’m not endorsing it yet (kinda huge and plasticy), but if you are also looking for a powerful portable, I’d suggest you throw it into the mix.

Hours spent actively shopping? At least 24. Actual credible options that fit my specs? Just this one (plus a similar HP, which I eschewed).

Sunday Night Writers’ Club

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I am now a member of a highly-exclusive, secret society with strict qualifications for its members.

It’s a Writers’ Club. You know, like a Book Club, only we’re reading each others’ books (and short stories, and poems, etc).

As with many of the intriguing developments in my life over the past two years, my recruitment began innocently enough with a series of tweets to Britt and Eric Smith. They had been pulling all-day writing sessions in a local coffee shop and posting photos of their back-to-back laptops accompanied by mucho caffeine. I commented a few times on how that would be an altogether fabulous idea to get me back into gear in editing my 2010 NaNoWriMo novel.

The tattered, marked-up, hard copy of my novel.

That is when the mysterious invitation appeared in my inbox. No location, no details. Just a question – would I be interested in joining the Writer’s Club?

(Luckily, the first rule of Writers’ Club is not that you do not talk about Writers’ Club. Those sorts of clubs are not ones where I particularly flourish as a member.)

I nervously accepted the invitation and then spent about two solid weeks freaking out about other people reading my novel. Not just any other people. Writers. People who take plot and characterization seriously. Some of them have degrees in English.

Luckily, I was at least slightly prepared for their onslaught of literate opinions, but that preparation hadn’t been an easy process.

I spent the early part of 2011 reading and re-reading my novel, not really knowing what to do what to do next. The book had a lot of good bits, but I knew it wasn’t a very good book yet. It was like the skeletal structure of a very handsome person. No one calls a skeleton handsome, but  good bones are a great start.

I just needed muscles and flesh to cover them up with.

I heeded the advice of many authors more experienced than I – I set the book aside for almost a whole year. Then, a year after I penned its first words, I printed the entire thing out on paper and began a serious edit pass.

Why paper? Because, any proofreader worth their salt will tell you they make better edits with a pencil in hand. Also, it encouraged me to read non-sequentially. Taking on each chapter as an individual entity meant I attacked the weak spots much harder than if I had read them in sequence.

Flash forward to two weeks ago. I had a fist-full of tattered pages that have been with me on every commute to work, every visit to the gym – even on the plane to Vegas. Once I was past my authorial nervous breakdown, the time had come to take all those painstakingly scribbled paper edits and convert them into something cohesive and readable.

How did my first top secret meeting go? Just fine (after I first got drunk and confessed to Eric how terrified I was). It turns out, other people do find my book interesting. Even people with English degrees. They also find all the awkward bits I find awkward to be awkward. They also find some fun turns of language and plot that I didn’t even intend, but that make perfect sense.

I am much less nervous about mailing the chapters for my second engagement with the club. Now the problem isn’t fear of sharing – it’s not being sure when I’ve edited enough.

That and the randomly failing keys on my laptop, but that’s a story for another day.