In between fiddling with That Damned Laptop and my NaNo project pages and Quatro, The Undead PC… I have managed to churn out 5,000 words or so over the course of three days. This means that I’m actually on track, oddly enough.

The laptop trouble turned out to be entirely the fault of Mandrake 9.0, the KDE portion of which is hopelessly befouled. I installed it onto one of my desktop PCs at home and had even worse performance than I did on the laptop! Desperate to get a Linux-based writing utensil working, I installed (sigh) RedHat 8.0. It’s working, but I’m not as happy as I would have been with a good Mandrake rig. Oh well. Once November ends I can blow it straight to hell and try something else.

A fair portion of my weekend was spent at Java Vivace in NW Portland hanging out with fellow WriMos. An impromptu kick-off party was held Saturday afternoon, while yesterday was our “more regular” semi-impromptu meeting. I got there early yesterday and managed to get most of the day’s quota done between bites of omelette and sips of cocoa.

As an aside, is it just me or do coffee shops have the world’s worst hot chocolate? Bland, lifeless cocoa is the bane of my existence. One of the banes, anyway. It doesn’t get better with whipped cream, I can assure you. Someone, please, point me towards a place that serves really tasty and sweet hot chocolate.

To sum up, not only am I solidly on track but I have a working progress chart, backup copies of my work on almost half a dozen computers, and a new group of friends to chat with both online and in person. And I’m sure we’ll stay in touch for at least a couple of weeks after November has passed…