So when I left for family vacation in Iowa last week, I thought I’d put the cover files for Star Wanderers: Deliverance (Part VIII) in my dropbox folder. It turns out, I didn’t–it’s still on my desktop back in Provo. Since I don’t get back until late on New Year’s Eve, that means that it won’t be coming out until January.
Sorry about that, guys! I hope you don’t mind the wait. Everything else is coming along fine–if all goes well, I should be able to hit “publish” on January 1st, with the print version coming out later in the month. The print versions are already up for most of the other books in the series, though Amazon hasn’t linked to all of them yet. When they’re all up, I’ll post the links here on this blog.
Christmas has been really great this year. I’m here in Iowa with my whole family–mother, father, sisters, brothers-in-law, niece, and nephews. The kids got a bunch of new toys and have been playing with them all week, while the rest of us have been reading, chatting, cooking, and playing lots and lots of Settlers of Catan. That’s more or less the family game now. I’ve won two rounds so far: one with the 5-6 player expansion, another with 4 players on the old board (which is hard!).
I didn’t have much on my Christmas list this year, but I did get something I’ve needed for a long time–a new laptop computer. I’ve been using an Asus eee PC since 2008, and it’s held out extremely well, but 1 GB of RAM just isn’t enough to cut it anymore. Plus, the battery and adapter are both generic replacements, and if I try to charge the battery while the computer is on, it switches from wall-power to the battery and back again every second or so, which is annoying.
My new machine will be an Asus X200CA, with 4 GB RAM, a touchscreen, and an 11.6″ screen. I wanted to keep it small, so I’d be able to use it as a travel machine. It comes with Windows 8, but I ordered a 128 GB solid state hard drive to replace the one that it comes with, so I’ll be installing Ubuntu on it instead (probably 13.10). I’m a little bit nervous how that will work with the new UEFI, but from what I can tell it seems that Ubuntu should work fine with it. I’ll just go in and turn off secure boot before I replace the hard drive, so I can install the new OS from USB.
My roommate just got a solid state drive for his operating system, and now his desktop boots up in about six seconds. Hopefully, it will be the same once I get this machine up and running. 128 GB isn’t a whole lot of space, but it should be plenty for all my writing needs. I want to get out of Utah and do some traveling in 2014, so that’s going to be important.
That’s just about it from here. There’s something cooking downstairs and it smells delicious, so I’d better get going. See you guys later!
