11:58pm

This week has been interesting.

I completed a project that has been eating at me for a while. Our Generac generator came with a wifi module, and when we bought it, my Wifi network wasn’t what I wanted, so I never connected the generator to it. Two years later, it is now connected and accessible through the Mobile Link app.

That makes me happy.

Though… I just checked it, and the app says the generator has been offline since around 2:13am this morning. That is suspiciously close to when my network devices update, so I need to go out there again and try to get it reconnected. If it’s going to require personal intervention every time my network updates its firmware, I think I will adjust the update frequency to minimize having to walk out there.

Ah, well…

In other news, I solved a problem during the course of getting the generator connected to Wifi.

Back around the 6th of September, we had an outage during which it seemed the transfer switch didn’t actuate properly. The generator spun up, but the power in the house never came back on. I figured it was a problem with the transfer switch, because I went out and manually actuated it to no avail.

While I was working on getting the generator connected to Wifi, though, I noticed this…

After a Google search and a call with Generac Support, I flipped that switch back to the ON position. I suspect that corrected the problem, but I haven’t tested it to confirm.

I’m not really a fan of cutting power to the whole house to test the generator, and besides, living in rural West Virginia is such that Mother Nature will provide us a power outage by the end of the month… I have no doubt.

The past week has been sufficiently crazy that I haven’t made as much progress as I’d like on the site switchover. I need to re-focus on that. I have been making progress writing… though, again, not as much as I’d like.

Torvalin is currently sitting at 58,139 words. That’s 60.4% of the way to my target word count (96,250 words). However… I have been consistently surpassing that target word count by at least 18,000 words for the second and third titles, and I expect that will be the case with Torvalin as well.

I’m really liking how the story is shaping up. I was nearly finished with Lynxeen when I realized I wanted another novel before Vorcalix. I can’t imagine a story other than Torvalin filling that gap. It is exactly what I want.

I’m sure some of you are having a “Well, duh” moment right now, seeing as how I’m writing Torvalin. One would hope it’s exactly what I want, right?  🤣

Well, I’m not an outliner. I never was, really. For my first few novels, I used a modified version of Randy Ingermanson’s The Snowflake Method, but since then, I’ve been what Joanna Penn calls a discovery writer, most people call a pantser, and Dean Wesley Smith calls writing into the dark.

Even with outlining, sometimes a story will hijack the plan, and the best outliners will recognize that and run with it. Given how I write? The evolution of the story pretty much defines the plan.

One of the most difficult parts of doing what I do is finding the best method. Because each and every one of us are different, each and every writer’s best method is different from every other writer’s.

There have been projects in the past that I didn’t like how they were evolving. So, I’d either go back to see where the story took a wrong turn or scrap the project entirely if I don’t have too many words in it.

I may return to those scrapped projects one day… or I may not. We’ll see.

Alrighty. I’ve rambled on for long enough.

If you’re reading this, thanks for sticking with me.

I hope the days treat you and yours well. Stay safe out there.