First chapter's revisions FINISHED

I have completely finished revisions on the first chapter of my novel.

Gearing up for NaNo

I love Camp NaNoWriMo because it hardly feels like we've finished before it's nearly time for regular NaNo again.  We have less than two months before November 1st, and I'm already getting excited.  I went into the online NaNo store and finally bought the travel mug I had my eye on last year (and ooh, look! they have new USB bracelets this year!) and made a $10 donation (gotta have that halo on my profile pic!).  I want a sweatshirt but I'm ever so confused as to which ones are available with a zippered front, and it's a lot of money to spend for something I might never wear (I don't generally like pullover hoodies).

Back to revisions!

Toward the end of last week, I FINALLY finished the research I was working on and got back to making revisions in the electronic file.  This is a big deal because just like when I got sidetracked with reading Victorian vampire literature, I'd gone off on a tangent that was keeping me from progressing on my novel... but I felt like I couldn't continue until I finished my research, lest I just have to go back and do more rewrites when I found through my research that I'd gotten something wrong.

Distractions

Silly me, I thought having a beautiful, fast new laptop would get me to write more!  In fact, it has been a major distraction, though perhaps not in a bad way.

My new writing machine

With the help of my ever-supportive husband, I just got a new laptop: a 11.6" Sony Vaio with a touchscreen, running Windows 8.  This is a huge jump for me -- I've been writing mainly on my Averatec 1020 for the past 8 years, with a short stint on an Asus Eee netbook.

Setbacks

The month of August (and, really, the last half of the month of July) has so far been filled with setbacks.  After my computer was dropped in July, it went into the shop, where it resided for almost a week.  I generally refused to work on my netbook, although I did get a little bit done here and there.  Shortly after I got my computer back, my iPhone decided it was its turn to go on the fritz, and mysteriously deleted all of my contacts.  I had to restore the phone to the last update on my computer in order to fix the problem, but in order to do that, I first had to clear enough room on my very full hard drive for iTunes to create a fresh backup of my misbehaving phone.

Camp NaNoWriMo fail...

The July session of Camp NaNo is over now, and I'm sorry to say I didn't make my goal.  There were two reasons why: One, my laptop getting dropped meant that I spent a lot of my available time on finding parts and getting it fixed (not to mention I really didn't want to type much on the keyboard once it popped out in one corner); and two, research.