I’m installing NT 4.0 on one of my computers right now. It’s about as involved as a heart valve replacement self-surgery, and twice as dangerous.

I haven’t written in here for a while - it takes more effort and I’d rather spend my time working on other stuff, but I’ll still try to nail stuff in here as much as possible. It was just the 4-day weekend and I spent a lot of time doing anything but working on the computer. I did a little work, and I’m happy with the changes that are starting to happen in this draft of Rumored, but it is taking forever. Oh well.

I better get back to this installer before it completely destroys all of my work.

I’m trying to write as much as possible on the book and I just don’t have enough fucking time. I need to trim more from my life - I wouldn’t say trim more from my life really. It’s not that I write and work and play NFL football and I need to drop one of the three. It’s that I lead a very lazy lifestyle and it’s a choice between being comfortable and living a busier lifestyle and writing more. I mean, I sleep 8 or 9 hours a night, every night, unless I have time to sleep 12. Should I sleep 4? Maybe that will burn me out so much that I can’t write. I need to read and fuck around and play on the computer to get ideas for writing, so it’s almost like those things are essential. I could seriously drop everything and have a 6 or 8 hour of space available every night, as opposed to my 2 or 3 hours. But would I be able to write if I did that? There’s the delicate balance of the whole thing.

I like how the writing is going - i am simultaneously worried that I am not getting weird enough and that I’m getting too weird. I am worried that if I put in a billion weird scientific references like I want to, I will become a Mark Leyner clone. But I like to be thought of as a thinking man’s (or person’s) writer, and I like having fucked up references that only apply to computer programmers, biologists, and illicit drug users. Building a cult audience is my first priority. Fuck accessibility.

Sometimes I wonder what parts of the present will be things that I cherish in the future. That doesn’t make sense, but when I think about the past, I enjoy the memory of certain things, people, places, or times. But I can also remember that I didn’t neccesarily enjoy these things in the past.

Example: in the 1994/1995 school year, pretty much everybody moved away or graduated, except me and Larry. I spent a lot of time with Larry and a lot of time alone. I wanted to be elsewhere, and I wrote every day about how I wanted to escape, sell all of my stuff, get on a greyhound and go to LA or Arizona or Seattle or Mexico or whatever. When I was there, I hated that life. But I enjoy many of the memories of that year. I think about when I’d spend Saturday mornings in bed writing until 2pm, and then wander the streets of Bloomington. And on weeknights, I’d take a nap until 8 or 9, and then go to a computer lab and write until past midnight. It’s a pleasant memory now, as long as I don’t remember everything alienating and alone about that point in time.

But the point is, I didn’t think I’d ever look back at that point in time and cherish it. And now I think about my life and wonder what parts of it are going to stick out in my head 5 or 10 years from now. It’s strange to think about.

Two years ago was my last night in Bloomington, and my last day of work for UCS. I sold my blown-up Mustang, worked my shift, cashed my paycheck, and packed the last of my stuff into boxes. It feels like it was so damn long ago. After I left, I always thought I could go back and it would be the same, like all of the times I went home for a summer or a weekend or a Christmas. But when I did go back over last Xmas, I realized too much has changed. All of my old hangouts are gone, all of the people I knew have left, and I see everything in a different way somehow. Bloomington was always beautiful compared to Elkhart, but when I go back to the campus, I just see another Indiana town with all of the typical Indiana problems. And the sad part is that I don’t have the same magical feeling I had in Bloomington in my new home town. Seattle is okay, but that campus held such an incredible, perfect feeling to me for all of those years.

It all sounds sappy, so I’ll stop babbling…

I guess there was another earthquake last night, or rather thismorning, at about 3

. I was still awake, fighting with sleep. It’s hard to tell if it was an earthquake or not in my apartment, because all of the traffic on I-5 frequently jostles around my building. This was a 3.something and didn’t do much. There have been like 3 or 4 minor but noticeable quakes in the last week. I heard a theory that all of these tiny slides might prevent a big earthquake.

I finished my first line edit of Rumored last night - it took about 13 days, not all of them productive. The next step will be to enter all of my changes into the computer - I edit on paper with red pen and then integrate everything into the original in emacs. It takes longer, but I like working in bed with a clipboard. More intimate… plus I’m lazy and like to lay down and write.

The next step will be to go through and rewrite each and every paragraph. Maybe 10% or 20% will stay, but the rest will be chopped up and redone from scratch. That’s a bit extreme, but there will be changes. Too much of the book talks about me - I need to obfuscate it. It’ll be a lot of work, but fun.