I have been in or traveled through Dallas, TX, three times now and have not yet experienced a stay in any Dallas Texas hotels. This is more by circumstance than design. Once I spent a few hours there, including some time at the Sixth Floor Museum, but kept on traveling. Another time I only drove through on the way to other places. And the third time, I was planning on staying overnight, but it didn’t work out and I ended up deadheading it back to Minnesota the same night I went down.

It’s too bad because without a stay like that, it’s kind of hard to capture the real flavor of a place. I’d love to have more Dallas exposure so that when the time comes, I could write of the area convincingly. But it hasn’t happened yet.

Oh well.

Moving forward, the best way for me to make sure I never lose 80 pages of a manuscript again will be for me to back up my data religiously. Of course, I knew this before I lost so much of my novel, but I just never followed through. No longer.

There are plenty of ways to back up data. I say… use as many as possible and be overly redundant! And always look for a good sale, like the kind you can find at Buy.com. They offer everything one might need to ensure data security several ways and through several methods.

The handiest, of course, is through the use of a flash drive. These things range from small to very small, and usually you can pick up a fair amount of memory for a small price. About two gigabytes will run sometimes as low as five bucks, while sixteen gigabytes can often be had for under forty bucks these days.

But one thing I think is essential is to back up your entire hard drive to a second hard drive, at least once a week. That’s why I like the deal Buy.com has right now on a Seagate 1TB external hard drive. It’s just the thing for the job. While not quite as portable as a flash drive, the external hard drives are much larger (this one would be twice as large as my current drive) and are a breeze to install… just plug it in via a USB 2.0 port, let Windows Vista install the driver automatically, and start backing up your data… remember… once a week, like clockwork.

I’ve shopped around and Buy.com’s price of $131.99 is as good a price as I can find anywhere, and the free shipping really seals the deal.

After you get your first rejection on a new project, it’s tempting to sulk a bit; but that’s not how one becomes a successful novelist. You have to burn those feelings away like fat exposed to a healthy dose of Leptovox, and move on.

The best cure is to just set of goal to write the next chapter. Once you do that, you’ll fall in love with the story you’re telling all over again and it all comes back to you; the story’s the thing. Not selling the book, not the advance, not anything else; just telling the best story you can tell the best way you know how.

I wrote 45 pages in about 24 hours late last week. Unfortunately, that work wasn’t on my novel. Instead, I stoked my creative fire pits to blazing on behalf of my sermon-writing.

These efforts including my first full-length sermon, as well as a Torah commentary, and while this sort of writing can go quite a bit faster than novel-writing, it’s still quite an effort to complete 45 or so pages in that kind of time span under any circumstances.

The last time I can remember being that productive in such a short stretch was when I completed the novel for my master’s degree, back in college, when I wrote over 200 pages of material in about a week.

One doesn’t need a Sony Vaio to be a great writer, although it helps if you like to write while away from home. Personally, I have far worse writing habits.

Most of my writing is producing laying on my stomach on the carpeted floor of my bedroom, neck craned up at an uncomfortable angle to see my screen, and usually late at night. And my PC of choice is a powerful desktop system fully outfitted with the latest version of Microsoft Office 2007. Although it began out of necessity, it’s not part of my writing routine and I’m not sure I’d immediately be as productive if I suddenly invested in a computer desk and a comfortable chair to sit in.

Although it’d probably be a lot easier on my neck. Maybe I should think about it a bit more.

The main fear I’m holding in terms of my mother’s pending death is not so much the death itself, painful as that will be. No, the main fear is the ongoing absence of her from my life.

It may sound terrible, but I’ve always had an easier time talking to my mom than my dad. I love them both, but I’m closer to my mom because I can talk to her more openly.

While Dad is still with us, once Mom is gone, one of my main security blankets in life goes with her. The fact is that she’s always been one of the people I can call and talk to when life isn’t making sense.

That’s the biggest fear. That in the weeks, months and years that follow her passing, there will be days, or nights, when I wake up wanting to call Mom… and realize, I can’t anymore.

(And here when I was a kid, I thought acne treatment was my biggest fear.)

Pride comes before the fall. And that doesn’t mean before autumn.

I’ve been thinking some today about how important it is not to let the little things bother you. It’s a hard skill to employ. After all, it’s usually the little things that trip us up.

It’s rarely the major things that cause fights or disputes; it’s rarely the big stuff that causes wars to break out. It’s the details.

The great thinkers say, “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” and “It’s mostly small stuff.” But if that’s true, why is it so hard to actually DO that?

Take for example weight loss pills. I need to drop at least 40 pounds. Pills like that might make it happen more quickly. But what’s the long-term damage, and is it worth it?

For me, how quickly I lose the 40 pounds is the small stuff. The important stuff is that I’m moving in the right direction, toward losing it.

It doesn’t take a Slingbox to keep up with your manuscripts while traveling for the summer. All you really need is a laptop. Unfortuantely, I don’t have one.

Of course, I’d love to have one; for one thing, it’d make me able to sit in the living room with my wife while she works on homework and blogging, while I work on my writing projects and blogging. That would be a great benefit.

But ultimately, it comes down to spending priorities, and with my car currently in the shop needing to be repaired, transportation is taking the lead and mobile writing ability is taking a back seat. So it looks like a flash drive may be the best way to go, for the moment.

It’s not like many writers get gold watches at the end of a long career, but have you ever stopped to think about how much work writers who stick with it put in? While those who specialize in manual labor might disagree, even a creative pursuit like writing can be exhausting.

Trouble is, an exhausted writer may have worked hard for months and seen no return on his labor. That’s where manual labor workers have a bit of an edge; they get paid for their efforts no matter what, more often than not. Not so with writers. We can go through a world of ideas without landing a single paying gig.

Maybe it’s just the Sunday night blues talking, though. Time to get some sleep soon.

The romantic image of a writer pounding out a script in cheap hotels while hoping to land his first big break in Hollywood is familair to most people, but that’s not usually how it’s done.

Typically, Hollywood producers meet with proven writers and want to hear thumbnail sketches of several “high concept” ideas, rejecting most of them out-of-hand before a word has even been typed. The real writing work comes after a studio’s at least offered concept approval.

It may tarnish a favorite Hollywood legend; heck, the mythical image of the struggling writer sweating and pounding away at a typewriter has been a popular one; it was even the core setting for “Barton Fink,” by Joel and Ethan Coen.

Unfortunately, it’s a false image.

I’m not sure I understand the urge to “go small” with everything. I recently bought an Insignia 4GB MP3 player, mostly for music and audiobooks. But the thing has about a 1.6-inch screen and is capable of playing videos.

On a 1.6-inch screen? Are you kidding me?

About the smallest I could imagine going is an iPod Touch screen, with features a much larger screen at 3.5-inches… about twice as big… and even that has given me squint-headaches when I’ve seen in-store demos.

I mean, it’s a nice feature and all, but practical? Not really.

It’s the same will text messaging. I like email; I can put it on my 17-inch monitor and puff the text as big as I want to; on the average cell phone, you again have maybe a 1.6-inch screen and keyboards so small, it’s hard not to hit more than one letter at a time with my big, oafy hands.

Smaller is more convenient, sure; and more portable. But, much like a woman wearing a corset, bigger’s not always better.

In this digital age in which we live, it’s important to have the right self defense products on hand to protect your computer (and thus your work) from outside threats.

That’s why I like Kapersky Antivirus, which I recently picked up from Best Buy. In the last couple years, I’d tried and been disappointed in both Norton and PC-cillan due to incidents both my wife and I have had with those products.

Kapersky’s different; while those products update maybe once a day, Kapersky updated pretty much every hour on the hour. As such, they respond more quickly to the viral threats that can take down your hard drive and thus subject you to losing a lot of your work.

Trust me, after having not just one, but TWO computers crash on me in the space of three months last year, I’ve gone through that pain. Twice. Now, in addition to backing up my work a LOT more often, Kapersky is one of the things that gives me peace of mind about my writing being secure on my hard drive. This isn’t an official review of their product… I just was thinking about how much I appreciate it and decided to share.

It’s more expensive than other solutions, but this is one case where you get what you pay for.