This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of October, and to the public at the beginning of November. Not a Patronizer? You could be!
I’d like to say that the title of this month’s post is a clever pun in some way, meant to either expand your vocabulary or troll your deficient vocabulary.
It is not.
Terry Pratchett said, “They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that it is in a body that, in the morning, is going to be hanged.”
The mysterious pain in my arm that keeps me from sleeping well? I’ve severed my rotator cuff tendon and get to have surgery for it. Having surgery to fix a health problem is a privilege in the United States, but I’m not looking forward to the four to six weeks my right arm will be immobilized. It’ll happen some day soon. My hope is to be able to appear at my divorce hearings without being hopped up on painkillers.
What’s the date? No idea. I have an MRI tomorrow, then get to meet the surgeon
But I’ve stopped lifting my right arm as much as possible. I stop my martial arts practice. I’m still doing tai chi, but with only one arm. I can still dangle my arms at my sides, so my hip-mounted keyboards mean I can still write. For now.
Other projects that I talked about last month? On hold. I’m cramming to try to get as much of OpenZFS Mastery finished before I lose use of an arm. Ideally I’ll get a first draft completed and off to reviewers before No More Typing Day. I have no idea when that will be. I do know that if I wait too long to have it fixed, it will not be fixable and I will be in pain the rest of my life. So it’s getting fixed ASAP.
My Internet existence is typed. When No More Typing Day happens, I expect to be mostly missing for 4-6 weeks.
On the plus side, one of my future novels will feature a one-armed character and his struggles to adapt to a two-armed world. Writing a book about the experience will, of course, make the surgery tax-deductible. That’s how business works.
Fortunately, I can plan for temporary disability. The Twisted Presents Kickstarter is over, but I still must fulfill it. I’m ordering the signed books today, because they have to be shipped twice. My ever-trusty Director of Analog Distribution, Alex, is standing by to fulfill DAD duties such as the dropship spreadsheet and chasing survey respondents. Worst case, I must sign Patronizer and backer copies of Twisted Presents with my left hand. That’ll be a fun collectors’ item, for very low values of fun. (Yes, yes, before you comment I’ll add: “and collectors.” There. Happy?)
Fortunately, a friend has offered to stay with me for a few days after the surgery. I’ll have two spare hands to help me sort out what I missed preparing.
So am I going to spend six weeks watching Star Trek, in order?
Perhaps. Or perhaps I’ll… take the opportunity to try dictation again?
Dictation is weird. I cannot speak coherently. My vocabulary exceeds the abilities of any dictation program I’ve tried. Writing sysadmin books with dictation is not possible. With SSH Mastery I tried a hybrid approach of speaking parts of the prose and typing commands, but my copyeditor immediately identified the dictated parts by error density. Oops. My fiction uses the characters’ voice and vocabulary, which means training a single dictation program to manage all of my fiction is a non-starter. AI dictation? Bah! AI generates minimum viable text which, despite the label, is completely non-viable. I know professional novelists who use dictation. Only a handful use software. Many hire transcriptionists.
This might be the prompt I need to finally write that book on how to make a living writing.
That’s a book I don’t particularly need to write. Whatever I say, people will tell me I’m doing it wrong. People will tell me I’m lying, or greedy, or arrogant. Greed is relative, of course. I want to pay my rent and get through my surgery without needing a GoFundMe. Some people aren’t doing as well as me. If I needed big money I would have stayed in tech. For decades, my goal has been to make “enough.”
The book would make trouble, but it sat in my brain like a noisy cricket hiding in the bedroom. I outlined it a few months ago, mostly to inescapably bind it within my literary spell book.
BUT–I would write that book in my own voice, using a comparatively simple vocabulary. Which means dictation might work. It won’t. I know it won’t. But it might. The attempt might distract me as I recover. Or, I could just give up and watch the ~850 existing hours of Star Trek, except that would involve once again witnessing “Turnabout Intruder” and I’ve sworn an oath in that regard.
The good news is, the core structure of OpenZFS Mastery is complete. The difficult work was coherently explaining the core concepts. What remains are crenellations and outbuildings built on that knowledge. The remaining chapters?
- “Encryption” is brand-new.
- “Replication” has a working shell from the first edition, but needs updating and expansion for new features.
- “Hot Spares” will be easier than folks think, because mostly you shouldn’t.
- “DRAID and AnyRAID” won’t be too horrid.
- “Caches” needs updates, but the first edition text isn’t actively terrible
- “Sharing” is a bunch of straightforward small topics riveted together
- “Performance,” “Tuning,” and “The ZFS Debugger” are my favorite type of chapters: Allan’s problem
Can I finish this before surgery? Who knows. I’m gonna try, though.
After all, my mind is concentrated upon being hanged.