As you may have guessed from my previous post, things did not end well between my HP printer and I. It balked at printing a measly 150 pages, and insisted that I pay $30 for two ink cartridges to do so. Two. Ink. Cartridges. Brand new. And it managed to print half.

So, suffice it to say, we’ve got a new printer that happily printed out my entire manuscript, front and back, without having to manually flip each piece of paper (bonus!) so I’m a happy camper. And the toner cartridge prints – get this – over 2,000 pages (and it’s only $15 more). I know, my printer obsession is a little weird, but at this stage of the book, I need to be able to print it out and edit it with a pen. It’s a LOT easier to read on paper, and much easier to revise. Much as I love Scrivener, I need to be able to print the pages out. Consequently, my old HP printer is sitting in a corner thinking about what it’s done. Running to Kinko’s every time I needed to print out the draft wasn’t an option, as it was only marginally cheaper (and far less convenient) than using the HP printer. keep reading »

I actually remember when Hewlett-Packard had some decent products. My dad used to have an old inkjet printer that would churn out pages – I think it printed somewhere around 250 pages per cartridge. It was black and white, and by the time it was on its last legs, I had to hand feed it paper, but it was a true workhorse.
These days, HP seems to hold its customers in the same regard one might hold a cockroach they’ve just discovered crawling through their silverware drawer. That is to say, with surprise, horror and disdain. Here’s why: keep reading »

As we approach the new year, my schedule becomes a lot tighter. While I still don’t have a set deadline for each week, I try to get through a chapter a week if I can. If the best I can accomplish is jotting down a note about a plot point that would be really good to add somewhere in this book, I consider that a win. I’ve scheduled a week of vacation time to finish it up in the first week of January. Yeah, we’ll see how that goes. If I’m ahead of schedule, it means a full week of submerging my face with a scuba mask on into a bowl of cold spaghetti while guzzling ice cold diet doctor pepper and playing long rounds of The Sims 3, because when I game, I game girly. I don’t really know why or how cold spaghetti figures into my fantasy of what it must be like to “relax” and be on “vacation,” but trust me, at least I no longer stare blankly like a confused puppy when people tell me I need to learn how to relax and not work all the time.

We decided to relax tonight and order some takeout and watch a movie. Mid-movie, Manfriend turns to me, and says, “Would you mind… if we took a break?”
Shocked, I looked at him, “What!”
“…from the … movie?”
“You… you really need to work on your phrasing.”

In other news, it’s official: we’re domestic partners. We’ll be drinking a toast, in paper cups, of boxed wine. Happy holidays, everyone.

Life is crazy. I have to come up with aliases for the people in my life so that I can refer to them in this blog without putting anyone on the spot, or incriminating the guilty. Okay, so first person I need to create an alias for is one of my friends who lives in the same building as Manfriend and myself. She’s an awesome person, and I don’t want to get into too much detail about her, because this is an public blog, but it would be nice to be able to reference her and say, “So this weekend, Manfriend, Blank and myself went to a birthday party,” and obviously I can’t refer to her as Blank. keep reading »