.......

(Come hither, little thoughts, I know you're there somewhere... Ah yes, there you are...)

Soundcard's still non-functional but to be honest I haven't made that much effort to fix it. More irritating though is that the cd-burner needs to be reinstalled and while I've got the drivers I stupidly didn't make a note of the password code thing to activate it. Won't be making that mistake again.
But, I'm able to get online, and write and that's the most important thing. : )

Speaking of writing, SFSG is on hiatus for a wee while. It'd ground to a halt after 6-ish weeks of intense (for me) work and I decided I needed a break. The little short I'm working on at the moment is lots of fun though, and sufficiently different from the novel to be refreshing.
I've also decided that for the most part I won't be posting my original fiction online. What I'll do instead is perhaps post a teaser here and if anyone's interested in reading something they can email me.

Still on the subject of writing found this quote on Oddverse (used without permission.)

There are often claims that Science Fiction and it's bastard daughter Fantasy are in some way easy escapist nonsense. The argument runs along the lines of: These worlds are fictional, rather than researched. So they're made up. So the writer, in choosing to set their fiction there, has done something easy, and therefore to be derided.

This is, of course, nonsense.

It's one thing to write a novel set on the world of the bouncing pigs. It's another thing to set a novel on the world of the bouncing pigs, but make the world entirely plausible, make the bouncing feel entirely natural, make the characters the sort of living breathing characters that the reader can relate to, and tell a story that says as much about the culture inhabited by the writer as it does about the culture that the writer has created. In some ways, writing what you know is the easy way out. Creating something plausible is much, much trickier.

I tend not to write 'real life' situations, partly cos the idea of research is too much like hard work, but mostly because it's much more fun creating my own worlds. : )

<g> And then there was this - the results of my personality defect quiz. (Nicked from Valkyrie's lj.)

Starving Artist You are 28% Rational, 0% Extroverted, 28% Brutal, and 71% Arrogant.

You are the Starving Artist! You are more intuitive than logical, and are primarily guided by your heart and emotions. You are also very introverted and gentle. Of course, this does not mean that you do not have an ego. In fact, you are surprisingly arrogant for someone so emotional and gentle. This is why you are best described as a starving artist. You are very introspective and quite sure of yourself, as any accomplished artist is, yet your views are impractical, emotional, and overly gentle. You probably find math, logic, and similar intellectual pursuits offensive to your artistic sensibilities, and you prefer the open-endedness of artistry because then you know you can never truly have a wrong answer. So really you have no reason to be arrogant, you big doofus, because the skills you value (emotion, spirit, art, etc.) in yourself are valuable only on a subjective level, meaning your arrogance is purely masturbatory. In short, your personality is defective because you are arrogant, introverted, introspective, gentle, and thoroughly irrational...posessing most of the traits needed to be a starving--and useless--artist. So get out there, write a few short stories that are allegories for the spirit, and starve! To put it less negatively: 1. You are more INTUITIVE than rational. 2. You are more INTROVERTED than extroverted. 3. You are more GENTLE than brutal. 4. You are more ARROGANT than humble. My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 3% on Rationality You scored higher than 0% on Extroversion You scored higher than 29% on Brutality You scored higher than 81% on Arrogance

Link: The Personality Defect Test written by saint_gasoline

Tee hee hee.