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I have no pages to show for today, or none that I’m keeping. I got very impatient with myself about it. I started to really beat myself up, then I thought well there is the new computer. It’s not really the computer itself that’s freaking me out, it’s the new monitor. It looks so different from my old one, or any of the monitors I have on any of my other computers. Changing in the middle of the book is hard and I knew it would be, but I remember yesterday thinking, I can do this. It’s not so hard. Then we got the call from Carri about the car accident. Strangely, priorities changed.

Today Carri made me go to my office. She said something like, "I’m not here to distract you from work. I’m here to make sure you work." I don’t argue with reasoning like that usually, and today I listened even harder. One, I was glad that Carri was all right enough to come to work. Two, anyone who can use one arm to fend off a tire that has just come crashing through their windshield is not someone to be argued with. So I went to my office to work.

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t settle down enough to focus. I finally did a long meditation and felt some better, but the scene still wasn’t working. So, I went over to check and see how Carri was doing. She was doing all right. The next time I checked on her she’d voluntarily laid down for a nap and that told me just how bad she was feeling. She did manage to get some work done today and the e-mails and business letters actually read well and were to the point. On Vicodin you don’t want me to write business anything. Jon, too, is out for the count on pain killers. Apparently, Carri is made of sterner stuff. But wait, we learned that yesterday.

By end of day the scene still wasn’t working and I couldn’t figure out why. The last time I came over to the main part of the house I suddenly started to crave ice cream. I looked at Carri, and said, "Are you wanting ice cream?" She was, so I drove and took her out to get ice cream. We got ice cream for Jon and Carri’s wife, Pili. They got waffle cones to the side. Jon got Goldcoast Chocolate like us, but Butter Pecan for Pili. We put her ice cream in the freezer so she could get it when she picked Carri up to go home. But while we were out getting the desert I talked about the scene that was kicking my ass. With the right people sometimes it helps to talk about it. Jon is one of those people and it turns out Carri is another. By the time we got back to the house I realized that the big party scene to try and introduce the remaining guards was too many people in too big a bunch. It was just not the right way to intro everyone and my subconscious had known it all day. It had just been waiting for my conscious mind to catch up with it. So I’ll change the day in the book from Saturday to a Sunday then have Merry go into work for Monday and intro the remaining characters in much smaller groups. Much more manageable both for me as a writer and you guys as readers.

So tomorrow I tackle the new monitor and do actual pages on it. Jon has now adjusted the brightness, the contrast, and the amount of zoom. The monitor is huge compared to my others, but Jon got me the smallest one he could find that sat flattish to the wall. Tomorrow we conqueror this new piece of technology. I have a book to finish and I can’t be a big baby about this, but with the new computer I can print. It prints every time with no hesitation. It isn’t doing any of the flaky things the old one was doing. Very happy about that.

But I was beating myself up about the fact that changing computers in the middle of a book and having my assistant and good friend get in a car accident was throwing me off my game. Then I thought, if I were my own friend what would I say to me? Well, I’d be a lot kinder, a lot more understanding, and cut my friend a lot more slack than I was cutting me. So, I decided to act as if I was my friend and not my enemy and treat myself just a little more gently. Things went better after that, and even better after ice cream and visiting. I was just really, really glad to have Carri here today to visit with, hell, to do anything with. Pages or no pages, it was a very good day.