by Bruce BethkeThere's a hodge-podge of stuff in the hopper this morning, so if you don't mind, I'll just dive in and start flinging things out.
The Friday Challenge Fiction Showcase
After a three-month coma caused by the Curse of Otogu, the proposed fiction showcase has been once again been reanimated and is now lurching towards escape. One item of business that's come up as a result is that we'd like to contact Tom, who used to post here with some regularity and even won a challenge or two—particularly the "slay the princess, rescue the dragon" challenge. If I was really clever I'd maintain a list of the names and addresses of everyone who has ever won a challenge, but until now, I have intentionally resisted doing so. Ergo, Tom are you still lurking? Or does anyone else here know how to contact him? If so, drop me a line at slushpile at thefridaychallenge dot com.
Wordses
Oops, I've done it again. Otogu. The Ben Richards Rule. Snowdogging. A First Rule situation. It occurs to me that over the past five years we've developed something of a private language here, and perhaps that inhibits clarity. Would an official Friday Challenge Lexicon help, and if so, can you think of any other terms that should be added to the list?
Assessing The Week in Review
We've been running the "This Week in The Friday Challenge" segment for some time now, so it's time to begin assessing the results. Do you read it? Do you find it helpful? Do you find yourself going back to older posts on occasion, or do you find that you pretty much stick to reading and commenting on today's—and perhaps yesterday's—post?
We're always interested in improving the readability and appeal of the site. If you were running the show, what is the one thing you would really like to see added to The Friday Challenge? (Yeah, I know, more and larger cash prizes every week. Dream on.)
On a related note: now that we've switched to alternating Greater and Lesser challenges, how is that working out for you? Are you finding that you are more or less motivated to participate from week to week?
Requiem for a Hard Drive
Well, it had to happen eventually. Earlier this week I had a burning idea for a new story and a little spare time in which to write fiction, so I whipped out the Serious Working laptop, hit the power button, and—rachety-rachety-whine-grind|CLUNK!—
DRIVE NOT READY ERROR
No operating system found
Invalid drive specification
Abandon all hope, ye who login here
No, not Mr. Laptop. My no-longer quite so shiny nor quite so new Dell Lassitude is still plugging along, thanks to a recent keyboard transplant. The Serious Working laptop is an old Epson 486, which I used for serious writing work precisely because it was an old monochrome text-only DOS box that did one thing and only one thing well: it ran WordPerfect 5.1, which until this week was my word processing software of choice for serious work. No graphics, no email, no Internet; when I wanted to really focus on writing, in a monastic, sensory-deprivation sort of way, it's the machine I reached for.
And now it's toast.
No, of course I don't have a recent backup of the hard drive. This beast predated laptop CD burners, USB ports, or even 10Base-T ports. When I wanted to back it up, I had to haul my HP Colorado tape drive out of the closet, hook it up, and dedicate half a day to running and then verifying a backup tape. What a nuisance. It's been years.
I find myself feeling a strange ambivalence about this. On the one hand, nearly ten years of false starts, half-baked premises, and attempted novels that ultimately went nowhere have been wiped out in the blink of an eye. That's a hell of a lot of typing that didn't even get the meager dignity of going down the drain.
On the other hand, I've been struggling to find a way to break loose of my own past, reinvent myself as a writer, and possibly reboot my writing career. Perhaps all that's happened is that I've finally lost some useless weight, cleaned the fridge, gotten a new haircut, donated my old polyester pants to Goodwill, insert suitable metaphor here.
I'll let you know how it turns out.
Finally...
After months of waffling, I've rejoined SFWA. I'll let you know how that turns out, too.
And that about wraps up the news for this week. Your thoughts, comments, and observations?
~brb
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