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What Happened?

Yo, Rob! What the heck happened? You were posting like every other day and then you said you were going to scale back to every third day and then…Nothing, nada, zilch! What happened?

RIP The Laptop

So, my laptop died and took a bunch of works in progress with it. Unfortunately, my desktop PC is still running Windows Vista and I can’t read the laptop’s hard drive or any number of other more modern devices. Quite irritating.

So, I called the Pioneer Skill Set channel content “done”. Until I can extract the relevant data from my laptop’s hard drive, it will just have to be what it is. As for other projects, I started working on some stuff that I can do without my laptop.

In addition to my laptop crash, my feet have been in a seriously painful state. I have been getting them looked at and physical therapy is coming along fairly nicely, but today they’re absolutely killing me. The podiatrist says short term pain for long-term gain. Cool, but yeeeowch!

And Then

So, what is it that Rob would be doing without access to a laptop? Well, I have a novel that’s been sitting there ¾ done for a few years. I went back and re-read the thing so I could try to strategize a way to get the last ¼ sorted out.

A bit of editing got me out of the corner I’d painted myself into but I’m still not feeling great about the villains’ motivations. They’re just kind of there because they’re kind of obligated to be, but they’re not doing anything that makes any kind of actual sense or contributing much to the plot.

That’s pretty frustrating, but I am grinding gears trying to get them to play along in a useful way. However, they are villains so I guess it’s kind of silly of me to assume they’d behave themselves.

All the more frustrating is that not only can I NOT get my villains to have a discernable motivation, my muse is really wanting to switch over to Space Opera mode. When your writing instinct wants to jump genres, but you’re so close to being done with the story that you’ve already got cooking it’s a perfect recipe for brain-lock.

What else? I had an idea for a board game for my Christmas site. I wrote up a set of rules and designed a prototype.

My wife and kids playtested it, but it needs serious revision. I’m not quite sure how to get it to flow the way I envisioned. That will take a bit of doing, but when it’s done there is a site called The Game Crafter that provides print on demand services for people with game ideas.

You upload all the relevant graphics and select pieces, dice, board, box and whatever other accessories you need. Once it’s all there, they give you a unit price for production and you decide on a retail markup. It’s pretty darned cool.

Now What?

Given that I’m stuck working on the family PC with somewhat limited access (at least until the school year is over for my younger kids), I’ve started building PLR article packs to sell at my extended rights site. I’ve also been looking at different ways to restructure the site.

I’m thinking about doing a WooCommerce online store. A lot of my friends who do PLR sales like to use AMember Pro, but there’s an upfront cost that I’m not in a position to shoulder. Maybe if the WooCommerce version becomes untenable, I’ll be in a position to segue to the membership model.

I usually insert a snappy quote somewhere along here, but I just don’t really feel like it today. I just wanted to touch base and let you know what the hold up has been. Once the kids are done school, I’ll have more time on the PC for updating sites.