The MacBook is on its way (allegedly in Amsterdam being handed over to the European courier), and I have covered most of the home row in Dvorak now. Admittedly I'm finding it a bit difficult to concentrate on the drills with a couple of kittens running round the room! I've also gone back to posting on Forward Motion, Holly Lisle's writers' forum, as by spooky coincidence they are doing a Dvorak challenge this June!

My MacBook order was assigned a UPS number this morning, and so I phoned up to confirm that the delivery was still on schedule for Monday - which it is :)

On the Dvorak front, I am doggedly working through the drills in order to get the whole keyboard learnt as soon as possible. I'm skipping the speed drills, though - there's no way I can keep increasing my speed as well as learning a completely new layout (and unlearning the old one)!

My MacBook arrived at 1pm today, and I'm posting this entry from Safari whilst I download some OSX updates - I decided to get some of the dull but essential stuff out of the way before I transfer my documents across from the iBook.

I know I've been remiss in blogging for the past few days, but I wanted to get the new MacBook set up first.

Over the last couple of weeks I've taken advantage of my semi-computerless state to spend a lot a time thinking about what I'm going to write. As a result I've decided to make a significant change to my main character and see if that helps to inspire me.

Well, I've finally got to do some writing at last! I haven't done any outlining at all this time; I just want to try out my new character idea and see how it goes. I'm also writing in longhand rather than on the computer; that way I can't so easily be tempted to prematurely submit a sample to the writing group.

Yesterday was too hot to think, never mind write, so I only managed a couple of lines, but this morning I wrote a couple of exercise-book pages (probably 300 words or so), which is a start :)

One of my favourite quotations on the subject of writing is by David Michael Kaplan, in "Rewriting: A Creative Approach to Writing Fiction". He says:

"To make a silk purse from a sow's ear, first you need a sow's ear."

This first rough draft is definitely a sow's ear!

I've been exceedingly lazy this weekend and not done any writing, nor even any typing drills. I started with good intentions on Saturday afternoon, trying to come up with a good surname for my main characters, and got distracted by a genealogy site. I then spent the rest of Saturday and the whole of Sunday tracing my ancestors through the UK census records online. It's totally addictive - so far I've identified four sets of my great-great-great-grandparents, going back as far as 1790!