One Note and the Evolution of Life Explained.

I would like to take a minute and explain something to all of the people on Google Plus who have missed me. Mom, are you listening? Just kidding, my mom is not on Google Plus. Anyway, I have been very busy.  Work has been filled with all sorts of work. I had to finish a story, a column and I am working on a novel.

One of the best parts about writing a novel is the chance to try new things. Or, old things, like One Note from Microsoft. I have been using One Note for the past several years. If you count installing it on all my devices as using it. But, I could never really figure out what to do with it. I loved having that icon, though.. 

Occasionally I would open it and try to add something. It was almost impossible to understand. I would have been better off using a puddle of blood, a pointed stick and tree bark. Since that is a clear violation of OSHA regulations I just kept the information in my head. A bad idea.

Since there is so much information in my head, and the operating system and all the hardware is outdated, and no longer under warranty I would get the most erratic results. It took a lot of time to go back through pages of my novel and find out where a character had been, and I got bogged down in the details.

Today, I was putzing around and found out how easy it was to manipulate and search data in One Note, I spent hours. Sure it isn't writing, but it was fun. And it reminded me of the song Red Angel Dragnet by the Clash "One of those days I'm going to get myself organizized."

Well, it won't be today. Because I am designing and drawing all the buildings that play a small part in my novel. You see, One Note has an exceptional ability to store pictures and I have a terrible weakness for goofing around with CAD programs. 

Pretty soon I am going to know everything there is to know about the fictional world I am creating, then I will just have to tell everybody about it, in book form. I can't wait.

500, read and 'em weep, but please weep quietly.

Yesterday I posted my 500th entry in this humble blog.  Five hundred is a big number, a lot of words, and some investment of time, not always a lot of thought, or any real ideas, but plenty of..., well I don't know what, but there is plenty of it.

Looking back it is still uncertain what drove that first post, so many months ago.  And I can't really say why I keep typing.  I guess, maybe, I had something to say, and maybe I still do.  Maybe, maybe I just like the idea of other people reading the things I wrote, and maybe I am just too stubborn to stop, who knows.

It seems like I should do something celebratory, something significant, but, like my reasons for starting and staying, what that would be escapes me.  We are going to a pot luck dinner at our neighbors house this evening, I might pretend that is all in honor of 500!  I will do that on surreptitiously, taking a few pictures, and acting like they are all there praising my talent, or at least my endurance.  Look for pictures here, with embellished banners and speech bubbles, later.

I have been considering changing platforms lately, maybe Wordpress, or something similar, mostly because I have a new computer, (a Surface Pro 3) and in Microsoft Word there is an option to write, format and publish my blog posts, but I can not figure out how to use the picture server to work.  (I have a Flickr, Photobucket, and Picasa account in case any of you technical wizards have any insights.)  But, at 500 I am not sure I want to change.

Recently I have started submitting work to Lefty Pop, and Find.com, and they are tied at two published submissions each, so stay tuned for updates.

That covers the past, for the most part.  Now, I need to start working on the future, and that is pretty cool.