Friday, 15 February 2002

One of my friends at work told me that the head of some committee at his church had called a meeting for the evening of Valentines. He said he was considering canceling his Valentine's plans for the evening. I told him he was crazy. A long-scheduled event was no good reason to spend Valentine's day with anyone but your sweety, certainly an activity sprung on you at the last minute isn't one.

Jackie and I had a great Valentine's day. We met for lunch out, then had a quiet dinner and evening together at home.

Today Jackie went off for an adventure. She and several other spinners went to a shop up north near Rockford that sells spinning fibers. It's the closest retail shop that sells such stuff, but is still far enough away that it was a fourteen-hour expedition all together.

I've had two stories blow up on me lately. I get one or two thousand words into them, and then boom--no more story. I think I'm just over-analyzing before the story's done. Anyhow, I've started over on the non-lethal story. I've read a couple of really good pieces lately that use very personal, concrete images to explore universal themes. My stories have tended to focus too much on the idea and not enough on the personal. I'll still have the idea, but I want to make this a very personal story. Surely I can do that.

The piece of the former @home that served our area is going to convert over this weekend. This won't affect my web site, which is on Prairienet. It will take some time, because I'll have to figure out how to get my OpenBSD firewall machine configured for the new network. Not a big deal, I hope--just rely on DHCP for everything. But I'll have to remove some fixed addresses from my DNS configuration. I hate wasting time that way.

John Savage's recent journal entry is on the topic of story structure, talking about the same things he and I had discussed at lunch on Tuesday. So, you can read what he actually has to say about the topic instead of my vague summary.