Julia Slaughter

Posts Tagged ‘RW Work’

It’s funny how my moods are tied to the weather, because when I opened the door and the hot air hit me in the face – I felt myself deflate. I suppose this is Indian Summer. The temperature is rocketing towards the upper 80’s and the humidity makes the air feel like a hot wet towel. Sadly,  the weather was at its nicest while work was at it’s busiest, but I’ve had a taste of Fall and I’m hopeful that more is coming soon!

Yesterday I retreated from the heat to my local bookstore, but the clock was ticking as Rascal was at home waiting to be let outside. I wandered among the aisles and picked up a book, but on my way out I spied this sitting on a table:

At first I thought that surely it was a joke, but upon further investigation I find that it’s not a joke, per say, but rather a parody. See, Pride and Prejudice is in the public domain which means the copyright has expired, it’s why you can download a copy of someone reading it for free from Librivox, so someone decided what Pride and Prejudice really needed was, of course, zombies.

I had rather mixed emotions about this book, see I like Pride and Prejudice. I’ve read it half a dozen times and listened to it about a dozen times, so I wasn’t sure how I felt about anyone messing with Miss Elizabeth and Mr.Darcy but I have to admit – I’m intrigued. I read the plot summary on Wikipedia and I think I might actually buy it.

What is so tantalizing to me is that the author managed to right a few wrongs. There are some characters that I always felt that Austen let get off too easily, but not so now that Seth Grahame-Smith has interceded. It looks like the dastardly Wickham is going to get his just desserts! (Even more so than just by virtue of marrying the flighty, superficial Lydia!)

I have another stack of books on their way from Amazon, but once it starts to dwindle – bring on the undead!

In high school I was a prolific writer,I wrote two novel length works that were passed around by my friends. I also wrote countless poems, short stories, etc. I mention this because I felt like in high school I was completely and totally focused on the task at hand – writing. So imagine my surprise when I reconnected with an old friend from high school and I told her she was never going to believe this but I had grown up to be a computer geek. Her response is that she easily believed it. Ouch, I guess I wasn’t as focused as I thought. I mention this because lately my “day job” has been rather time consuming and it’s computer geek related.

For more than a year we have been preparing for an inevitable upgrade, there have been countless conference calls, meetings, and mass emails flying back and forth. The upgrade is made more difficult by the fact that the machine we’re upgrading is a main frame, not a regular PC. When I maintained a Window’s network most of my software upgrades took an hour, maybe two, and that usually included prep time. So today should’ve been the beginning of the down slide, the bulk of the project behind us, (We expected some user hysteria, but that’s all perfectly normal.) but the bulk of the work should’ve been behind us. Did you notice the use of the phrase “should’ve,” well the upgrade didn’t go through as planned and so now everything is in limbo. The upgrade is kind of like a hurricane brewing out in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s going to make landfall and ruin my weekend eventually the question is when.

At times like this the desire to flee my “day job” is almost overwhelming. I would much rather focus my energy on writing, but when projects like this hang over my head it’s hard to concentrate on anything but that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m doing other things – watching True Blood, reading what other people are writing, but I just can’t lose myself in my own story the way I wish I could. (Frankly, I’m proud of myself that I’ve been able to keep my once a week blogging thing going.)

Anyway, let us pray that the Upgrade will make landfall soon so that I can weather the storm and get back to doing what I love to do.