Up until a few weeks ago, my “backup” process was pretty sad. Occasionally, I’d remember to boot up my external hard drive and I’d drag-and-drop some files over. More often, I’d e-mail important files to my Gmail account.

E-mailing files to Gmail also enabled me to move between my desktop computer with its big screen, and my laptop computer with its lovely portability. Unfortunately, I never got good about remembering I’d e-mailed myself files, so more often than not I found myself confused as to which version of my WIP was actually newer.

I tried copying files before I worked on them and renaming the new one with today’s date. That solved some of the issues, but I ended up with multiple copies of a file clogging up my hard drive and email.

But Dropbox has fixed all that. No more remembering to do anything. No more wondering if I’m working on the latest version. No more having to make backup copies before editing a file, in case I mess something up.

Dropbox looks like a folder in My Documents. Whatever I keep in that folder is automatically backed up to a secure remote server, anytime I connect to the internet. And Dropbox keeps a revision history for every file, so my previous edits are always saved. I don’t have to remember to do anything - I just keep my WIP in a subfolder underneath My Dropbox, and that’s it!

If you’re interested and want to know more, here’s the official Dropbox tour, and here are the FAQs. (And no, I’m not getting paid for this. <grin>)

I just finished writing a “one page” (2.5 page if you want it double-spaced and legible) synopsis of Booby Trap, my next manuscript.

And I’m shocked to realize I had fun.

What a pleasure it is, I now know through painful trial-and-error, to write a synopsis before you write the entire book. You have no secondary characters to agonize over cutting. No clever plot twists too complicated to summarize. No subtle nuances impossible to convey in the brutish, brief sentences allowed in what’s essentially a piece of marketing fluff. Just the hero, and the heroine, and the hook, and the plot arc. Just the main thrust — and if it’s a solid story, it just flows.

I will never again sit down to write a book without writing the synopsis first!

I’m hyper-aware right now of how much I have to learn when it comes to writing.

Last month, I spent an idyllic few weeks at Lake Tahoe, writing, hiking and getting back in tune with who I want to be. During that time, I got some late feedback on some pages I’d posted to my online critique group that threw me for a total loop.

It wasn’t that the critique was off; it was dead-on. But oh, did I not want to hear it. I did not want to revise those pages one more time. I’d gotten a lot of other feedback on the same pages that implied I was good to go, but this one dissenting opinion haunted me.

I felt sorry for myself. I called my husband so he could tell me to ignore it. I drank some vino. I took a long walk and argued with myself, telling myself the changes my friend recommended simply couldn’t be done.

In the end I set it all aside for a good long month, until I got home to Austin.

Once here, I incorporated all the other feedback into those pages. I revised, again, for action verbs and the five senses. I ran the sucker by my true-blue best friend for her final word. I had Approval. I was good to go.

And riding that high, I made the revisions suggested by the Dissenting Opinion, just to see — and making those changes raised the level of my pages to a whole new high.  Even my husband smiled when he read the new version. (He’s by far my harshest critic, bless him.)

Have I learned anything? Hopefully. I suspect I’ll go through similar convolutions every time I hear feedback I know in my gut is going to help my writing, but which would require a lot of work or sacrificing copy I love.  But next time, I won’t wait a month to make those changes, not if I know they’re right.

I’ll try to remember that it’s far more important to get something right in the end, than to be right the first time out of the gate.

Once again, I’m going to post off-topic. I saw part of the filming of Transformers 2! I happened to be hanging out in my parent’s condo in Long Beach this past Wednesday evening and it overlooks the end of the 710 freeway, where the crew was filming some car stunts.  I’m sure post-filming special effects will make this shot even more spectacular, but seeing it live was pretty neat (and by “neat” I mean heart-thumping: it looks like the camera guy nearly got killed, and a 1/4-ton piece of equipment got ejected over the bridge and director’s head to land in the palm trees near the foot of our building. The post-explosion cheering comes from a group of people watching from a nearby parking garage).

Here’s a short video I took with my little Canon Elf.

Live from the Olympics: Pissed-Off-Me.

I love our athletes. They worked hard to qualify for the Olympics, they trained their asses off on the way to Beijing, and they’re giving their hearts and minds and muscles over to winning the games.

But after the race, or meet, or game, every time, they’re dealing with the sharks.

The American media.

Why is the media so hard on the athletes that trained and raced and qualified to be on our American team, but “only” got silver, or bronze, or didn’t get a medal at all? Why does an adult ex-athlete ask another athlete, moments after losing a qualifying match, “do you think this is because you changed coaches last year?” or “Your family has been with you all along. Can you tell us how they felt just now [as we watched you sob into their arms]?” The guy did his best and came up short - often less than 30 seconds ago - and now he’s on international T.V.! Is making him cry into your microphone really that important?

Then to cutaway and see the tremulously toupeed Bob Costas comment “he just dropped an egg in The Bird’s Nest”… ARGH! Give him a freaking break, dude!

Obviously I’m conditioned to political reporting, where the hard questions and mean comments simply never come. Can you imagine any American other than Jon Stewart asking President Bush if he thinks he made the right call on… anything?

Why is it okay to be this harsh with our athletes and not our elected politicians? Can the media get in the game, please?!

I’m about to give a talk on Creating a Web Presence and barely had the presence of mind (ha) to write a post on the subject. Luckily I’m giving the talk with the detail-oriented, brilliant, witty, darling, nose-pierced lovely known as Emma Clair, who would kill me if I didn’t at least write one little post on the subject. Nothing like a healthy fear of death to inspire a late-night blog post.

First off - for those of you who are about to attend, or who have already attended our workshop, the handouts and supplementary materials from the workshop are available over at Emma’s site.

I’m not going to try to recreate our talk in this post, but I’ll say this: you don’t need to know much about the web to have a website, or a blog, or both. You also don’t need more than about $8/year* to have a site of your own. And it’s really, truly, honestly not hard. Go to Wordpress.com** and sign up for a free blog (even if what you really want is a website and not a blog). Once you have your free Wordpress blog, write a few pages; you now have a web site. Write some posts, and you also have a blog. (Don’t want a blog? Don’t write posts.) Choose a Wordpress ‘theme’ and you have a professional design. Write compelling, audience-focused content, and you’ll have an audience!

Yeah, okay, that’s some work, I grant you. But hopefully it’s not too scary. (Secret/not-secret: You can create many Wordpress blogs! for free! if you hate the first one, make a new one. They’re all always free.)

I hope that I get to see some of you tomorrow, and for those who attended the workshop and are reading this post after-the-fact, thank you for coming! I appreciate you taking the time and hope we were of some help.

There, now I can fall asleep without the fear of Emma’s wrath following me into my dreams.

(Who am I kidding? Emma put her stuff up on her site WEEKS ago. She’s wanted to kill me for WEEKS.)

Happy Conference!

* To register your domain name (also known as your “URL” - for example michellemcginnis.com). More details on that over at Emma’s site.

** No, I don’t work for Wordpress. There are other excellent, free blog/site options out there, and we list a few others in our handouts. I’ve just personally used Wordpress the most often, so I feel the most comfortable recommending it.

I’ve been tagged! I know, I know, it’s a cheap excuse for a post - but I love cheap. I’m all about cheap. Thank you Catherine Morris for tagging me and giving me this lovely cheap excuse to blog!

So Catherine’s ‘tag’ requires writing 6 random things about myself.  Hmm.  I’m just going to do this as fast as I can.

1. I’ve never punched someone in the face, and I’d like to. It’s on my list of “to-do’s” before I die. (I’ve slapped, but never punched. The slap I’m ashamed of. I don’t think I’d be ashamed of a punch.)
2. I crouch like a goblin in my expensive Aeron chair, making the good-for-my-back thing entirely moot.
3. My first instinct is to take things literally. I’ve tried to break myself of the habit but my brain don’t bend that way. Damn it.
4. I love the smell of hot concrete after a rain. As a child, I would lick it.
5. I read “Katherine” by Anya Seton when I was in the fourth grade, and fell in love. I read the book so often growing up that the greatest threat my parents could levy against me was to take Katherine away. When I was confirmed in the Catholic church I took Katherine as my confirmation name. I had to do a lot of interesting-but-beside-the-point research on some saint called Catherine in order to achieve this.
6. I prefer going barefoot to wearing shoes. Period.

Okay, now I’m supposed to tag people — Tagerific! Here are Les Rules:

• Link to the person who tagged you — me!
• Post the rules on your blog
• Write six random things about yourself
• Tag six random bloggers by linking to their blogs
• Leave comments on their sites to let them know they’ve been tagged
• Let your tagger know when your entry is up

And I’ll tag……. drumroll please! Ha.

• The lovely and talented Lady Jane Sevier
• My new friend Farrah Rochon
• Delectable Sherry Thomas, whose Delicious debuts this month
• Writing fiend Tracy Wolff, whose avalanche of literature will soon bury a bookstore near you
• Kit Frazier, the Texan Sue Grafton
• Rae Ann Parker, my conference friend who I’ll miss very much this year!

I’ve just discovered a wonderful thing, a lifesaving, marvelous, adorable thing: Leechblock.

This gem of a Firefox plugin allows me to block myself from viewing certain sites at certain times of the day. (Leeching away my valuable writing time.)

It’s simple: when I sit down to write, I enable Leechblock by selecting “Lockdown” for a certain amount of time. I can still get to Wikipedia to look up that all-important street name I need for a scene, but I can’t get to Gmail or News of the Weird or IMDB YouTube or any of the blogs I follow.

Voila! The best thing about this plugin is that it’s smart. It has options to disable its own options while a block is active (! get your head around that!) so that my very tech-savvy inner procrastinator doesn’t do a system runaround and turn the internet back on when I’m jonesing for a fix.

Check out the plugin author’s site to get a full list of the many terrific options.

Are you getting sick of pictures of leeks? Then you can imagine how I felt when I awoke this morning to yet another cup of hot leek tea. (The “soup” concept? Pshaw. It might psychologically help those who just loooove spooning up soup, but I’m a tea drinker. Put that broth in a mug and I’m happy.)

Lessons learned from yesterday, day one of my all-leek diet:

1. Pepper is the spice of leeks. Put some fresh-ground pepper on mashed leeks or even into a mug of hot leek tea and you’ve done yourself a favor.
2. Dried tarragon doesn’t develop its flavor fully enough when added to the leeks; don’t bother with it.
3. Celery seeds ditto. They add crunch, but not worth it.
4. Lemon + olive oil = yum. So to recap: the suggestions Mireille Guiliano makes in her book are the best ways to eat leeks. I haven’t been able to top her. <sheepish grin>
5. I’m a fan of variety, but I’ve also been known to eat nothing but Mexican food for days on end, or to content myself week after week with corn tortillas and slices of cheese every day for lunch. The key to successful repeat-mealdom? You have to like the meal the first time. A lot.

So based on lesson #5, here’s my advice. Before trying this diet, try having leeks as part of a meal. Experiment with the various ways you can make them delicious. Enjoy them. Then maybe, just maybe, you’ll be able to look forward to two days of nothing but leeks. I didn’t have that attitude, and though the leeks aren’t tasting horrible or making me ill, I’m not tap dancing on the walls.

Will I ever do this again? Maybe. I’m not going to shout Never! and stomp my feet, but it’s a bit tortuous. Day two is better than day 1, probably because the “oh my GAWD I’m hungry” stage has passed. And on day 2 I got to wake up having lost 4 pounds, which started the day off right.

I’m looking forward to a real meal this evening, though!

Yesterday I posted about leeking off some poundage. Today is day one of my leek-only diet. (Don’t worry, it’s only a two day diet, and tomorrow night I get to eat food again, so it ain’t going to take over this blog.)

This morning I woke to the smell of French Roast wafting through the house, teasing me into getting out of bed and into the shower before Termite Inspection Guy showed up. Alas, I am not allowed to drink coffee today—so I trotted downstairs to boil me some leeks.

I must admit it’s been years since I’ve eaten anything leek-inspired at home, and I don’t think I’ve ever handled a leek myself until this weekend. I learned things! Did you know, for instance, that over half the weight of a leek is in the green leafy part? Yep. This is a two-pounds-of-leeks recipe, but after I chopped off the dark green bits (leaving the recommended ‘suggestion of pale green‘) the little white stubs weighed less than a pound. Was this okay? No idea. I moved ahead and put them in a pot, covered them with water, and boiled.

The concoction then simmered for 25 minutes. The rich scent of brewing coffee disappeared into clouds of oniony-leeky steam that permeated every dusty nook of the house.

Drawn to the smell of my only allowed food, I plucked out the three stubs of leek and chopped them up, then dumped them and the leftover leek juice into separate Tupperware. I prepared my first half-cup of mushy leek, and seasoned with a tiny bit of salt and pepper.

(I have to apologize to Mme. Guiliano, as yesterday I raved about not being able to use any herbs or spices in this soup. Rereading her recipe and the surrounding instructions, she does allow a sparing use of salt and pepper when eating the mushed up leeks. Whew!)

I ate. And you know, it ain’t half bad? Boiled leeks taste like sweet, very mild onions. I also drank a small cup of the hot leek juice; not so good. Hot leek juice has a slightly oily consistency and tastes like—yep, you guessed it. Leeks.

We’ll see what types of herbal mischief I can inflict on my poor foodstuff later this afternoon.