But my tablet is in Calgary.

And I’m not. Between me and it is a huge snowstorm.

But Best Buy is shipping Mouse home, so all is good. He might even get here the same time as the headset! Which is good, because Ronon the backup laptop is good, but, but awkward. I want the tablet to be trained on Dragon Naturally Speaking as well. We used Stargate Atlantis characters for most of the laptops and computers around here, we had McKay, Sheppard, Ronon and Teyla, but we sold Teyla and bought Mouse and Dresden the desktop. I’ve killed an awful lot of laptops over the past ten years, I think the body count is 9 with my record being laptop being through the door then broken was about 5 minutes (loose battery cable, if you want to know, definitely not my fault).

I’m almost ready to start the new thing. It’s funny how it works for me. It starts with an idea or character, but then I need a fermenting period. I need to sort out what the complications are going to be, and where are all the missing pieces. I have a general idea of what the ending is going to be like. Most of the time. Really. In Cy Gets a Sex Demon, the two failed attempts Cy made in order to solve his problems originally weren’t just plot complications, they where how I thought the novel was going to end. The first one didn’t work, the rule of three only allowed three turns of the cards and I needed four to end it, and the second might have worked for Al Capone but it wasn’t going to work in the story as it was. The third, and final ending was the perfect one, but going into the last bit of the story I was panicked because I had no idea how it was going to work.

To start a book, you need interesting characters in an interesting world with an interesting problem. Once that’s been established, the middle of the book should have interesting characters still in their (or another) interesting world, making their interesting problem worse. And if they aren’t making the problem worse, someone or something should, and the main characters should be doing their darndest not only to match the worsening problem but trying to get ahead of it. And the ending is just the interesting characters, usually back in their interesting world, solving their problem interestingly.

No problem, right? Yeah. Right.