The new laptop arrived. I remember the old days when I would spend hours...days...a week...getting the new computer set up. Every program had to be installed. Every password had to be remembered, looked up, or changed (because who can remember ALL their passwords???) And that was after the original start up and hours of updates. Thanks to fiber optic internet, updates took maybe twenty minutes. Then I had to sign in to one account, using a PIN. Voila! My email and photos and virtually everything else effortlessly showed up on the new machine. Even my screensaver was transferred.  I did have to install my preferred browser since Edge isn't it. Plus Dropbox. Plus Zoom. I'm sure there will be more, but for now, it's pretty well ready to roll.  Meanwhile, the old laptop is still limping along, so I haven't sent it to the electronics graveyard just yet.

Last weekend's Pennwriters Conference went off without a hitch. Mostly. Having been a conference coordinator once a long, long time ago, I know there are lots of hitches and glitches behind the scenes. The trick is how you handle them. This year's coordinators handled them beautifully. I'd guess 99.9% of the attendees were unaware and were too busy having fun to notice. Smiling faces abounded. I had a glitch of my own to contend with. After teaching two workshops on Friday, I had one more to go on Saturday afternoon, and it was the one that totally depended on a PowerPoint slide show.  Friday night in my hotel room, I reached into my computer bag to pull out my laptop and was startled to feel how hot it was. Not scorching hot, but warmer than usual. Let me add that my beloved laptop is five years old, which seems to be their life expectancy. The battery no longer holds a charge, so I need to keep in plugged in when using it.  Anyway, I decided to err on the side of caution ...

Once again, I've fallen behind on my posts, but I have a good excuse. Several, actually. June was a busy month.  In case you missed it, there was my interview with James Patterson.  In addition to a bunch of appearances throughout the month, I was working on the next Zoe and Pete mystery, tentatively titled Helpless . It's proving to be quite the challenge.  At the end of the month, I received word that Death By Equine had made the cut and has been named one of THREE finalists for the Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award! I'll be traveling to Lexington, Kentucky, in November for the announcement of the $10,000 winner.  I also received my first editorial letter from my new UK publisher for the first book in my new Lake Erie Mysteries series. I wasn't sure what to expect. New editor. New publisher. The United Kingdom. But I couldn't be more pleased with her insights and suggestions. So for several weeks, I put Helpless on the backburner and focused my full attention on revisions...

As I last reported, my beloved old Dell Monster Machine gasped its last breath. Within two days, the delivery guy brought my new computer, Dell Monster Machine version 2.0, to my door. That was a week ago. One week, more money than I want to think about, days of file restoration, and a variety of curse words later, I'm back to where I was before the old compute went kaput. I liked how my old machine was set up. I liked the software I had installed on it. I didn't have to think about how to do stuff on it. I just clicked and tapped and things happened the way I wanted. My first victory (of sorts) was installing my ancient Office 2003 software. Yay! It installed! Boo... all the updates to make it compatible with newer versions are no longer supported. This means I can still use it on my WIP (work in progress), but I can't open documents from other sources. Okay, I can. I download them onto my laptop, save to Dropbox, and then open them on the new machine. A lot of wor...

Most of us, myself included, have a love/hate relationship with our electronics. Some days we wonder how we survived without our smartphones and our tablets. Other days, we want to throw the blasted beasts out the window. I've lost track of how many computers I've owned over the years. Laptops and desktops. My first was a Gateway running Windows ME. I didn't know about computer bugs, so every time it blue-screened, I assumed I'd done something wrong. It ran slower and slower. I added memory. It still blue-screened and booted up like a slug. By the time I'd decided to move on to something else, I was thrilled to see the thing go. Each new computer arrived bright and shiny. And FAST. And each computer, laptop and desktop, eventually became bogged down by all the programs I installed until they limped and crashed. Almost six years ago, I got fed up. I decided I was going to splurge on a computer with more memory and a bigger hard drive than I would ever need. My ...