Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Cold as hell for an April day

It’s cold as hell for an April day today, and I’ve got that Yes song “Leave It” stuck in my head. One down, one to go, another town and one more show…

I’m really pissed at my ISP today. They recently switched from sendmail to qmail without really telling anyone there would be any changes, sort of assuming that all of their customers are just idiots who read their mail in IE or something. After the change, all hell broke loose and pretty much everything mail-related in my account ceased to function. See, sendmail uses a spool directory, where your messages are concatenated one after another in one big file. Qmail uses a directory in your home directory, and it creates a file per message. It’s technically a better system, but after decades of the old system, damn near every program written for unix relies on the old way. That means that my mail program wouldn’t pull in new mail, I wasn’t getting notification messages when I got new mail, my account didn’t tell me if I had new mail when I logged in, I couldn’t quickly list the messages in my account, and so on. So last night, these fucking idiots converted all of my old saved mail folders to this new format, completely screwing me. The thing that pisses me off most is that these people profess to be unix-friendly and tech-saavy and all of this crap, and for the most part they have been, up until recently. Sigh.

Yes, I really am publishing Summer Rain. I don’t want to jinx it by posting all of the details, but I’m deep in the middle of editing it and trying to shake out all of the bugs. I hope to finish this by the end of May. Then, it goes off and in about 60 days, all of you will be cracking out your credit cards and going to amazon.com to check it out. I’m very excited about the process, and I’ve been writing more in the last few weeks than I have all year. I stumbled through some pretty pathetic writer’s block for the last few months, so it’s nice to cruise through edits and work on things. I thought Summer Rain was a dead project, completely unworkable. But it’s been fun to work on it lately, and I guess that’s all that ultimately matters.

Rumored to Exist is still alive, albeit still up on blocks and awaiting more of my attention. I can’t wait to finish Summer Rain and get back to work on it. It’s been hard to write new stuff for Rumored, but the stuff that is there will blow your mind. It’s completely 110% balls-out, pure gonzo insane. I wanted to finish it by the end of the year – I might, but it might take longer. We’ll see.

And I’m thinking that between the two, I might try to publish all of the archives from this journal, with some editing and maybe an odd short story or two thrown in there. Would anyone actually be interested in something like that?

Goodbye goodbye goodbye bad
Hello Hello heaven.