I’m accustomed to working on a desktop computer, but my PC still isn’t back from Best Buy… and may never be again since they’ve become real asses about welching on their no-lemon policy. I’m more committed than ever to building my next desktop system myself, from high-quality parts, not this bargain-basement crap Acer and Best Buy conspire on.

Anyway, I now have a current laptop, thanks to my Web page creation side-gig, and I love it; aside from the graphics, it matches the specs of my MIA desktop, or improves on them. However, it’s troublesome adjusting to the keyboard layout and the hinky touchpad mouse. I’ve pretty much disposed of the touchpad in favor of a USB mouse and am tempted to add in a USB keyboard as well. I will probably do that as soon as I get my desk put together, since I’ll then have room for the keyboard. At least I’m not laying on glass tile in the meantime; my floor at least has cozy carpet on it.

Other than that, however, everything about this laptop is awesome. And it’s not an Acer, thank God! It’s an Asus T60!

But I still miss my desktop.

It had to happen eventually; it was a title too good to mess with.

I revealed on my blog some time ago that the title for my supernatural murder mystery dramedy was Thirty Minutes Or Less: A Pizza Delivery Mystery. I worried about making it public, but I also knew it was rather obvious and if I didn’t move quickly, someone else would think of it, too, before too long.

And, as predictably as life insurance quotes, that is exactly what has happened; I was reading Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood blog and found out some big shot Hollywood type is prepping a comedy called, you guessed it, 30 Minutes or Less, centering around “the misadventures of a hapless pizza delivery guy.”

Well, at least it’s not a pizza delivery guy accused of murder and haunted by a victim he didn’t kill.

Or, more probably… it’s not until they read this post, right? The trick is to aim the gun carefully so you are sure to shoot yourself in the foot… and not a more vital organ. Ugh.

On their day off, some folks like to puff on those trendy new electronic cigarettes. Not me; I’m not a smoker. No, instead, I like to find time to write… or read, as inspiration to get back to writing more on my novel.

Believe it or not, I’m contemplating a 3.0 start on my novel, not because of losing my progress (yay!) but this time because I’m rethinking the way I’m rolling out the narrative; while it helped get me past my writer’s block on the novel after I lost my first draft to a crashed hard drive over a year ago, I now think that the “flash forward and tell a third of the novel in flashback” approach may not be the right take, from a dramatic standpoint.

I mean, look, my protagonist is being haunted by a murder victim he is accused of murdering, but whom he did not kill. The victim’s ghost knows this, but proving it to law enforcement? That’s another matter.

While starting the novel at a point where he’s captured and interrogated by the local and state police may be a great way to introduce all my plot elements quickly (including the fact that he’s being haunted by a murder victim he discovered), I simply can’t imagine him confessing to ANYONE that he’s being haunted, and then being allowed to go free, even if a guiltier suspect walks into the police station and confesses to the crime. It’s just too much of a stretch of credibility, even for a light-hearted murder mystery dramedy.

One of the most unique authors I’ve encountered of late is Seth Grahame-Smith. While I’m not about to go out and buy custom mugs with his name on them just yet, you have to admire his creativity.

His first novel caught my eye but never really compelled me to buy; Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was an adaptation of the Jane Austen classic – he credits her as co-author – with a strong zombie-fighting subplot mixed in by Grahame-Smith. It was an interesting concept but, not being an Austen fan, it was a bit lose on me.

His latest is Abraham Lincoln – Vampire Hunter, and looks far more promising. Disguising literary classics and history lessons as occult fad fiction is a unique take, and hopefully Grahame-Smith can get a couple more out before others catch on and start flooding the market with copycat fiction of lesser quality.

The concept of making Lincoln a vampire hunter is both hilarious and a cagey strategy to make the 1860s US president relevant to the Twilight-era of teenagers. Well done, sir.

With spring teasing that it might stick around after a somewhat early appearance this year, many folks are thinking about fun stuff like outdoor furniture. As for me, I’m excited that I finally have a new laptop!

Sure, my desktop can’t seem to stay fixed and out of Geek Squad customer service for more than a few hours at a time over the last couple months. And granted, I’ve been on an old laptop since then.

How old? Well, try Windows XP, 512MB of RAM, a single-core processor and an 80GB hard drive on for size. Heck, it only sports USB 1.0! Like an old workhorse, it still works, but it ain’t running the Kentucky Derby anymore either. Still, it’s hard to hate a durable Toshiba.

And my new laptop? Built for speed! Try Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, 4GB of RAM, a dual-core processor and a 500GB hard drive with USB 2.0! (Sure, USB 3.0 would have been nice, but virtually no one’s adopted that yet…)

Anyway, once I get the thing loaded up with the proper tools and humming, I’ll be golden! Gotta love my new Asus laptop!

I’ve been thinking a bit about print solutions for my workstation. My wife and I bought a printer with bluetooth wireless about six months ago, but unfortunately we don’t have all the extras that are needed to make such a set-up work, and the cost of the accessories is actually less than just getting a second printer.

So I’ve been thinking that maybe, if I get get a computer desk, maybe I’ll also just pop for a second printer, too. Wireless sharing of one printer seems like a good idea, but is it? I’m no longer convinced it’s worth it. So whether it’s an Epson tm-t88iv, a Kodak, a laser or an ink-jet, I am thinking that a two-printer solution might be the way to go… again.

My wife and I for years have been talking about wanting to move out to the West Coast someday. While that might seem like purely a writer’s paradise, with every passing winter it seems desirable for more reasons than milder winters alone.

Sure, winter seems all cozy and romantic with visions of cuddling before a wood fire together dancing in one’s head; but the reality is that winter’s a lot of colds, congestion, sleepless nights, annoying weather and discomfort. Who needs it?

People have always told me, “If you don’t like winter, why are you living in Minnesota?” My response has always been that everyone who means something to me is here.

However, much as I care about my friends, it may not take too many more long, cold winters to make me start reconsidering how those scales balance out. Something like Seattle, Portland or even San Diego rentals sounds increasingly more attractive.

No, I don’t mean a dance. But I do want to rave about my new mp3 player, since it is no longer and off-brand but one of Apple’s iPods: namely, a fifth-generation 16GB nano!

Sure, there’s not a lot that an iPod can do to improve my writing directly, but I can listen to audio books on it, not just music, and they’ve never sounded better. I used to think there wasn’t much difference among MP3 players, but now that I have a real iPod with iTunes, I can’t imagine how I ever got along with that Insignia for so long…

It’s been a fact since January, but I only recently found out about the death of mystery novelist Robert B. Parker. Parker was a huge influence on my back in the late 1980s when I was in college and trying my hand at mystery novels; his Spenser series was hot at the time and I prided myself on loving his novels before the TV series debuted.

Parker was a prototypical hardboilded detective fiction writer, projecting the standard tough-guy image. Actors who have played his series characters… Robert Urich and, later, Joe Montagna, on Spenser; and more recently, Tom Selleck as Jesse Stone… are all folks who bear a passing resemblance to Parker himself, as his fictional characters tended to.

Though in his seventies and certainly the beneficiary of a long career, I will nevertheless miss Parker; he’d just started a “Young Spenser” series for young adults, focusing on Spenser’s teen years, that he’d barely scratched the surface on. And despite some trendiness, his novels still made the New York Times best-sellers list on a regular basis.

Yet Parker would have liked how he passed; sitting in front of his work station, working on a manuscript. While his family and fans will miss him, I can’t imagine him wanting a more apropos exit than what life handed him at the end. While a coronary event isn’t the most pleasant way to pass on, at least he didn’t have to suffer anything long and drawn out and painful like mesothelioma cancer. And he was able to stay productive right up until the end.

Even though I’ve had mostly legitimate setbacks on my novel project, I’m really starting to feel like I’m treading water and, to mix metaphors, in need of some roadside assistance to get going again.

I started this current novel over 18 months ago, when I first learned my mother was stage four in her cancer and we’d be losing her soon. I suppose it was a bit of an escape, as well as a way of coping with the looming loss.

Which is odd because the novel doesn’t really deal with grief directly, and its theme is actually rather light and breezy, even though death is a major part of the novel – it being, of course, a mystery novel.

I suppose in some ways, enough time has gone by that I am coping with Mom’s death better these days and the novel is less therapeutic than it started out to be. But I really do hope to get back on track soon; considering why I started it, I’d love for this project to turn into my first published novel, so I can dedicate it to my Mom.

Time is the enemy of us all, but lately it’s been the enemy of my novel-writing.

Five weeks and counting, and my desktop PC still isn’t back from Best Buy because they keep not fixing it completely. If one more thing goes wrong, I actually qualify for their “no lemon” policy and get a new computer out of the deal, although I’d be just as happy if they could fix the one I have so it works right and stops breaking down.

Of course, getting a new PC out of it would be OK, too, since it’d have Windows 7 on it and that would maybe fix some of the problems, though I wouldn’t bet my car insurance on that.

So, I’m still on my sloggy old laptop for now… which means it takes longer to do everything and I run out of time…