Field Trip

I have my new laptop on its first field trip.  We are at Barnes & Noble.  I'm having coffee.  Laptop is having WiFi.  I will take a picture and add it in later.  (I haven't mastered The Cloud yet, or else I think the picture I just took with my phone would magically appear on my laptop and I could copy it here.  Someday I'll be living in that future!)

EDIT:  Here's the picture.  Yeah, corporate America gets my money.  But sometime in October Laptop will get decorated with Digger stickers - I supported Ursula Vernon's Kickstarter.  Not ALL my money goes to corporations.

In other news, the short story workshop I'm taking is half over.  We have started working on plot.  Ya' know, plot is definitely not one of my strong points.  I'm a natural pantser (also called a discovery writer).  This is why I need this class - to get better at plot and other areas of writing.  The homework due last night was five - yes, FIVE - plots.  I turned mine in at about 11:45 PM.  The deadline was midnight.

If you're so inclined, consider taking a class taught by Mary Robinette Kowal.  Here's a post from her website from July this year about what she teaches.  If you read her blog or follow her on Twitter you'll see the announcements for future classes.  Most definitely worth the effort.

New Computer

I spent All The Money and now have a MacBook Air.  It still feels strange, like it's really someone else's.  And you will never know how many typos I've made so far in just these three sentences because the keyboard Is Not Yet Mine.

No pictures today because I haven't played with that yet.

I have been using AppleWorks for almost all my document needs since about 1995.  Yeah, really.  There is no more AppleWorks; it was replaced with Pages.  At some point I added Pages to my old G5, futzed with it and decided I wasn't ready to learn yet another word processing program.  Somewhere along the line I forgot I even owned it.  Right now I'm very grateful to my past self for installing it, even if I didn't actually learn it.

Through Google I found a 2011 article in MacWorld explaining how to convert all your AppleWorks files to Pages.  All At Once!  So I am not facing software hell and the prospect of copying every document individually into another program.  Hooray for Macs!  There is still the possibility that all the formatting won't be saved, but that seems minor at this point.  I will do several documents individually to see how it goes before opting for a global change.

However, I have to learn another word processing program.  Several people I spoke to at work (all under 25) have never used anything but Word.  I can't even remember all the programs I've used.  Some of you may remember Word Perfect.  I know at least one person who still uses it!  Anyway, I currently use three.  AppleWorks, soon to be replaced by Pages, so they count as one.  Open Office at home for when I need a dot doc.  And Word at work.  They all do quite well at the basic tasks, but will use different terms for the same action and hide it in different areas of the menu.

In other news, the short story workshop is awesome and we'll be discussing our first critiques tomorrow night.  Maybe I'll share how that goes; maybe not.  Don't want to embarrass anybody.