So, if you read my blog you’ll notice that I’m always working on something. I have a writing or a programming projects, websites to maintain, and people to help. I’m pretty much busy all the time. A lot of that is because I have a laptop that sits on my lap and lets me happily obsess about all those lovely projects. I don’t just watch TV or movies, I’m usually writing with them on the background so I can look up through the fun scenes and then get back to the precious words.

The last few weeks, that hasn’t been the case. Fluffy has my laptop while I’m recovering hers. I thought I was done, but this weekend I found another 100 GB worth of pictures she forgot about and so it is slowly chugging through those files, timing out on the bad sectors, and recovering about 98.73% of them. Her working set was only 52k pictures, but the current set is about 150k pictures.

Needless to say, I’m very glad that I put Backblaze on her machine, but I really wished I did it a lot sooner so I could have used it for the last 20% of the files. Sadly, the backup program caught on the bad sector and never finished backing up the original 140 GB, much less the additional 100 GB she’s put on since.

At the current estimate, I have about 2-3 more weeks of recovery to get through. But, I’ll be saving most of the files. Between my efforts (98.72%) and what files were on Backblaze, I’m getting about 99.999% of the files she created. But it takes time to do what I’m doing. Automated time, but still time.

I have done almost nothing when it comes to writing in those four weeks. I got a few hours on the weekend, but for the most part, I’m creating nothing. No writing, no programming. The Android tablet is good for a lot of things, but tablets are terrible for creating things. Great for using, but they make very poor editors and programming environments. Which is fine, since tablets are a consumer product, but I can’t create. (I also chew through the battery in five hours.)

Part of it is priorities. SMWM’s stuff takes priority over my writing. Just as EDM takes priority over both. I’m still playing with EDM pretty heavily, watching a lot more TV than I should be, and playing a lot of Eufloria.

Of course, what is looming is the end of year obligations. I have a commission (from a trusted source) due at end of month. It’s for 15k and I actually planned it out this time so hopefully it won’t exceed 20k words. There is a call for submissions I agreed to two months ago; the editor has rejected me six times now, but I keep trying. There is also a call for submissions that I missed four times running and I really want to get something in there. And, the editor wants me to get my story in there. And, of course, the serial which is still ten chapters from the end because I’ve gotten no progress on it.

But I wish I was writing.

So, if you read my blog you’ll notice that I’m always working on something. I have a writing or a programming projects, websites to maintain, and people to help. I’m...

One of the drawbacks of being a developer is that I look at quantitative metrics instead of subjective ones. While I’m not measured against lines of code or anything as depressing as that, I know when the programs I write succeed based on the number of unit tests passed, number of change request tickets rejected, and the like.

No matter what I do, this carries over into writing also. It is easy to get get hung up on the number of words written or the length of a novel, but it is hard to feel like I’m accomplishing something without having a number to aim for.

One of the drawbacks of being a developer is that I look at quantitative metrics instead of subjective ones. While I’m not measured against lines of code or anything as...