Jhereg thru Phoenix (first five books of the Vlad series) -- Steven Brust
Vanity Fair -- William Makepeace Thackeray (I love the name Thackeray so much I'm writing a novel just to use it)
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Fourth Edition -- Currently on Canterbury Tales
Swallowdale -- Arthur Ransome
The Last Cavalier - Alexandre Dumas
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins
~~
The Art of Fiction -- John Gardner
Conflict, Action, & Suspense -- William Noble
Making Shapely Fiction -- Jerome Stern
Enchanted Hunters, the power of stories in childhood -- Maria Tatar

Well, we incorporated mid-way through last year, so the taxes got a bit complicated. That and a series of client emergencies has been tying me up. But that's all done. Done correctly? Time will tell. I care less at this point than I imagined I would (with regard to the tax filing, anyway.)

Because of the delay, 81 is going straight to Gamma round. Two scenes in this are a bit rougher than the rest of it, which got edited to death when I wanted to work on it but didn't actually have enough energy to write something new on it.

Now I have fifteen pages of new stuff to write for class by the end of tomorrow. Thank Merlin it's already outlined.

Chapter 81 -- Mystery at Malfoy Manor

Clutching the straps of her book bag with both hands, Suze pushed her way across the stream of students hurrying to dinner. Professor Snape's office door was open, she saw with some relief. She had imagined it would take a little extra guts to knock on the door this time.

( read the rest of chapter 81 preliminary post )

Yay, my Thursday class ended last week so I have some time this afternoon. I'm realizing as I revise how much slower I am because I'm trying to apply a bunch of new stuff I've learned. In the real world, 10k words is a lot!

---

Chapter 80 — Snake Lord

Harry licked his spoon and pushed the bowl of ice cream closer to Suze. In the August heat of Diagon Alley, the scoops had dwindled rapidly into pools.

"My house tonight?" Harry asked.

( read rest of chapter 80 )

I have three classes right now, although my Thursday one ended last week, so I have some time tonight (instead of finishing assignments) to make edits to 80. I just need to re-read the whole thing in one sitting and then I can post it. I'm going to skip gamma round given the delay.

Oh man, I need to finish some end of year accounting too. I keep conveniently forgetting that for some reason . . .

This took me a bit to work out so I'm posting it here in case it helps someone else.

I have both an auto-increment field called projectid and also a unique field called projectnum. Note, below will still throw an error about the duplicate projectnum field if the user tries to clone project 6 twice in a row. If they clone the clone, no problem. Probably easier to disable the clone option in the interface than to try to cope with it in the cloning queries.

This query requires that your auto-increment primary key is the first field in the table.

CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE projecttemp SELECT * FROM project WHERE projectid='6';
ALTER TABLE projecttemp DROP COLUMN projectid;
UPDATE projecttemp SET projectnum = CONCAT(projectnum, ' CLONED');
INSERT INTO project SELECT NULL,projecttemp.* FROM projecttemp;

The DROP command gets rid of the autoincrement out of the select list later. And that field gets written out correctly as NULL in the first slot on the INSERT command. <table_name>. is necessary in the last select following anything that's not a * or field name, apparently, (hence projecttemp.*).

Someone else suggested using ENGINE=MEMORY, but my tables have text fields and MySQL is not allowing that. So I'm creating an actual table on disk and then destroying it. This could be a problem if your system is very busy and mysql is not set to clean up regularly. Hm, also on a very busy system, you would probably want to make a temp table with a unique name based on a user connection id and some random stuff to avoid a collision. (or possibly temporary tables are tied to a process with their own name space, I actually don't know.)

I had this crazy plan to repaint the bathroom with this great mildew resistant paint. But one wall had this strange cracking in the paint. Turns out it looked weird because the cracking was actually the plaster mud coming off the concrete rock lathe. I also decided to replace the medicine cabinet. Behind that was a hole from an older medicine cabinet, and more joyful a hidden junction box, which I have learned from my Mike Holmes addiction is a big no no. Maybe I can just turn it into an outlet? Rewiring ups this project just a bit too high. On top of remudding just so I can repaint.

Look, I fixed it!

I personally like the added touch of one of the doors of the old medicine cabinet propped up in the hole full of pink insulation as a mirror. And the use of an Edison fixture in open air. I'm quite proud of that, actually. Hey, the light works.

We have gone to beta. The scene with the Draco letter was supposed to be the last in this chapter it got shunted to the top of 81.

I'm currently in three writing classes because I wanted to take one with this particular teacher, and that meant Romance!. I may have to just post my output from that here. I don't think it's going to be fit for anything else. I just can't do steamy.

We spent two weeks tooling around Italy. Driving in snow and sunshine. Some pics.


View from inside the Camposanto looking out at the Duomo and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The Camposanto was very interesting. The Holy Land dirt is incidental, the tombs and the frescos were really nice.


Some early morning Japanese tourists.




Sacra di San Michele (the ruins part) a monastery on top of a mountain near Turin (click for larger)

Sorry to go silent. We were traveling and now I'm totally swamped with work and other writing deadlines. Been making sure to pick up the chapter ever other day. Helps a lot to do that.

Caught up a bit and classes end next week, so I'll have a bit more time.

I turned on screening for all but friends to block a bit of the spam that seems to show up every few days.

We're going to the snow! But not intentionally. I wish my knees would handle skiing. Sigh.

Did not get much writing done this week while trying to get three weeks of work done in one week. And I'm working tonight too. Finally wrapped up what I hoped to wrap up on Wednesday.

Also, thank you countrymouse1 for the valentine's day virtual gift. That was very sweet.



Added: I should always only post black and white pictures on here. Looks much better.

" . . . the artist does his work much as witches do theirs, by following ancient formulas, creating art's effects with the daemonic help of older works of art."


A pic from the Lava Tree State Park in Hawai'i. Me Gusto on portrait mode blurring the background.

Go Tom!

Added: That was an amazingly low-energy game. Or maybe I don't watch enough pro football. (Mostly college). Also, no one seemed to be having any fun. Certainly not Brady. Come on guys, if you aren't having fun playing in the superbowl, time to reassess.