Journal Entry

After work yesterday, I spent a while on the phone with my dad, discussing his book. He's deeply embroiled in trying to find an agent, and I'll probably do a couple posts in the near future talking about that.

Anyway, as part of his quest, he also asked me to do a thorough critical and editorial review of his NaNoWriMo book, Chop, Grind, or Puree. I'm about two thirds done with that, and we spent nearly an hour discussing the issues with it.

Overall...it's good. It's way too good, actually, for a first novel written in such a short timeframe. Completely unreasonable. He's trying to do a little too much with it, I think, and needs some narrative focus, and there's some minor but persistent problems that are just there because he didn't spend four years getting a writing degree. But, for the most part, it's excellent.

I got off the phone around 5:45 and found D-- and N-- waiting in my living room. We went out to Freddy's for dinner, and then K-- and N-- went to church and D-- and I went back to my place to finish up some software installation on my computer. That took less than half an hour, though.

Afterward, we watched a couple episodes of New Amsterdam, but it was disappointing. We swapped it out for The Best of Steve Martin from Saturday Night Live, and it was a major improvement. That's a long collection, too.

While we watched TV, I was working on my blog migration project -- writing a script to cleanly move all my old Xanga posts over here. Parts of it turned out to be much easier than I'd expected. Other parts are proving truly stubborn (particularly logging into Blogger via script). K-- showed up just when I was getting supremely frustrated with Xanga, and showed me how to fix it. I just sent him an email about my current supreme frustration with Blogger, and I have no doubt he'll make fixing that look easy, too.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.