I had a chance to look over a site I’ve been to before again recently, and I found it to be much improved since my last visit. Now, I don’t make a habit of looking for diamond hoop earrings for my wife, because right now, we can’t afford it. But I do like to browse and daydream about what I’ll be able to do for her once I get a nice windfall from a multibook deal someday.

Anyway, the Tips for Guys section is nothing new to the Bella True site. I’ve been there before a few months ago. But it’s expanded since then and is much better at giving advice to us guys who want to make our women smile for the right reasons when we present them with a costly gift like a diamond. I especially appreciate the greater amount of detail given in the engagement ring section.

Of course, I somehow got successfully engaged without all the handy advice, but I can imagine how it might be a help to some people. The site’s tone is conversational, rather than formal, which strikes just the right tone. A big improvement since my last visit, to be sure.

Sometimes I like to think about an exchange I had with my uncle Kenny many years ago. A draftsman and engineer, he fell in love with the Commodore Amiga 128. The computer, had twice the RAM of the Commodore 64k, a whopping 128K. And he had just added on a new accessory, a 16MB external hard drive.

“This is all the memory you’ll ever need,” he told me proudly while sucking on his cherry-tobacco-stuffed pipe. “Do you know how much memory sixteen megabytes is? You could write a dozen novels and never fill it up.”

Over the years, of course, his wisdom has proven to have some holes in it. Since that conversation, Commodore has died out, Apple came and went and came back again, and MS-DOS has given way to various iterations of Windows. Megabytes have given way to gigabytes and terabytes and beyond and my standard portable memory cards are no longer 3.5-inch floppies with 1.4MB per disc, but a handy flash drive that holds 2 GB of information. (I own two of them.)

Of course, there are still plenty of people willing to sell the next “big thing” in memory storage. The latest is a sexy one terabyte hard drive I’m considering for my current PC. And of course, the sales pitch mirrors my uncle’s words from long ago: “It’s all the memory you’ll ever need.”

Of course, as a writer, I value memories like this far more than all the flash drives in the average Best Buy.

Like purchasing discount blinds instead of the ones you really wanted, sometimes as a writing you have to give someone what they are looking for, instead of what turns you on, to secure a sale.

Fortunately, some agents and editors are willing to let you know what they are looking for. For example, there is a very good agent who I’d love to have represent me. I pitched him my favorite personal project, Thirty Minutes or Less, and it’s not what he’s looking for.

So now, I’m pitching him a novel from his “What We’re Looknig For” list and hoping my take on the topic is one he’ll like enough to give me a shot.

Would I rather be writing my own original idea? Sure. But I’d also like to get published, get established and then maybe have a better shot at getting my Pizza Delivery Mysteries into print.

Well, I am truly back underway with my mystery novel, THIRTY MINUTES OR LESS. I’ve rewritten the first lost chapter and re-imagined it so thoroughly that instead of three ultra-short chapters, I’ve combined those aspects of the short into one somewhat longer, but still not too long, chapter.

This sort of re-imagining is exactly what I was hoping to accomplish in taking on the novel again; I knew if I tried to recreate what I’d lost, it would only read and feel like a pale imitation of the first draft, at least to me. Now I can feel safe to say that this is turning out more like tossing out a bad draft and starting over. That’s a good thing.

And as they always say, the worst day writing is still better than the best day selling car insurance.