Skinsongs progress...

Well, this week has turned into, pardon the pun, a write-off. The week's break last week has convinced me of something I already knew but was unwilling to admit - Skinsongs isn't working in its current form. It's headed in the wrong direction. Now, I COULD change the direction from this point onwards, but I don't think that'd be doing it justice. So I'm going to have to do the unthinkable, something Stephen King says never to do, and go back to the start and rewrite from scratch. I made some serious character and plotting mistakes in the first forty thousand words that need to be corrected before I can continue.

Bugger.

So, the rest of this week is dedicated to that. It's more an edit than a complete rewrite, the basic skeleton of the plot is still pretty much correct, I just need to fix a few things. Mainly:

• Upgrade the tech so it's consistent - I have automatic plastic surgery machines, yet everything else is pretty much as it is today, which makes no sense.
  
• Swap the fannish qualities of Trace and her flatmate. At this stage, the flatmate was the skinsongs fan, while Trace was a cynic. This meant that she didn't really want to be doing any of this, and was not emotionally involved. It also meant she dragged her feet at every friggin' opportunity, making the book slow toi a crawl. Stoopid characters. So I'm swapping part of her brain with Noni's. Let's see how she likes that!

So, no word counts until I'm back up to date. I suspect this will make the book shrink a little. I hope it will, actually, as I'm 40000 words in and nothing much has happened yet. Let's streamline the beast a little!

And maybe, just maybe, get me excited about it again.

Climb aboard the meme train!

From mynxii, angriest, leebattersby and battblush...

( Two words meme )

It's official... we're coming home!

Yes, we've arranged our lease to last until the end of January, and we've booked our tickets home. So you won't be free of us forever. :) The details of our flights are:

Outbound: 30-Jan-2007
Depart Arrive
London Heathrow (LHR) 11:15
Arrives next day
Singapore (SIN) 07:50
Qantas
Duration: 12hr 35min
Class: Economy
Aircraft: BOEING 747 400
Miles: 6748
QF32

Singapore (SIN) 09:10
Perth (PER) 14:10
Qantas
Duration: 5hr
Class: Economy
Aircraft: AIRBUS A330-300
Miles: 2431
QF72

So, we'll be home on the afternoon of January 31st. Seeyas all after that. :)

Email weirdness...

Okay, this is stumping me... emails sent from Mozilla Thunderbird to some servers (including Hotmail) aren't arriving. I've tried multiple email addresses and SMTP servers, to no avail. Okay then, I have to assume there's something about my IP address which Hotmail - and possibly others - are rejecting.

Then, as an experiment, I set up Outlook Express IDENTICALLY to Thunderbird. And sent a mail to my Hotmail account.

It arrived immediately.

Okay, so for some reason, emails sent from Thunderbird to Hotmail are not arriving. Emails sent from Thunderbird to most other servers seem to be arriving fine (though I'm not 100% sure, since I'm not getting responses... Lee, Lyn, have you been getting the emails???). And email from OE to Hotmail arrives no problems.

Is this some bizarre Microsoft quirk? To reject emails from its main email competitor? But then, why do emails sent from Gmail arrive at Hotmail no problems?

I don't get it. No way I want to move to OE again, I love my Thunderbird, but god only knows how many of my emails are being rejected without my knowledge. Bugger. :(