I worked yesterday and today. I really want to kill time writing nonsensical things, but no book ever got edited that way, so I’m sticking to editing the Isabelle story until I run out of critiques to read. And I’m working in my head on a new ending. The first one is kind of short and uninspired. It’s just an ending, not an exciting climax.

(I found I could work around those unpacked suitcases. Man, I’m lazy.)

Finally, it’s here! And it’s kind of pretty. I like my new laptop.

We bought a cheap one — if you get one from the company that someone returned because it was broken and the company fixes it, they can’t sell it as “new” so they sell it as “refurbished,” which means just as good quality but way marked down. This one has a DVD drive and everything (my desktop doesn’t).

Anyway, I’m just on to write this and copy my stories onto my USB drive, so I can move them over. Then maybe I’ll unpack from last week’s vacation, bake some cookies, and get to work. (It’s hard to work in a room full of suitcases.)

Jeff Foxworthy, stand-up comic, says in one of his acts, “I have heard that the number one kind of man women fantasize about is a dangerous man. A sort of 007 kind of man. But in reality, women with dangerous men are on Cops, hanging out of a truck window in a tube top going, ‘You lock him up! You lock his ass up!’”

I write about a world where good always wins, where evil is clear-cut and, well, kind of tame. Like a lion at the zoo. They’re fun to watch, and they’re really cool, but you don’t want to think about what they’d do if they got hold of you. Because the truth is hidden in a glamor of safety.

The Virginia Tech shooting is very recent, and it came during a time when evil had slammed its ugly head into my life — a man decided to practice his cruelty on a friend of mine, torturing her in her own apartment all through the night and attempting to kill her before he left.

At church today, the guest preacher gave a simple and true lesson about how evil is present in the world, but we have hope even in dark times because Christ has overcome evil. He referred to questions of “Why didn’t God stop it [the Virginia Tech massacre]?” with answers I already knew: God has allowed us to choose good or evil in our own lives, and some people choose evil. It’s no more complicated than that.

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The Symposium

I hope to be reviewed there some day. Only problem? Need to get PUBLISHED first!!! Argh.

Technicalities, technicalities.

Seriously, though, Miss Snark, the literary agent, had some advice that sounds similar to what I keep telling myself: “Your job is to write. Unplug the damn internet and get to work. If you need to buy another computer that doesn’t actually hook up to the net, do it. . . . There’s a lot to be said for sitting down with your ownself and writing. Nothing, literally NOTHING replaces that. Focus. You’re wasting time.”

Lucky for me, I’ll have a new laptop within two weeks (was supposed to be next week, but they got snippy about us using a slightly different road than the one on our credit card, even though it’s the exact same road but just has two names). And I won’t leave this laptop anywhere near that hairball of a cat.

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Now let’s get down to a little work. The Symposium is running a contest that I don’t really care about winning (second place looks nice . . . it’d help me buy Meg Cabot’s latest . . .), but looks like a lot of fun to enter. I just have to review the site and two of its reviews. And I’m kind of fond of the site already, because it joined my button rotation on my other domain and it’s not a sparkly, hurts-my-eyes, “Look what I made in a doll-editing program and adopted from other sites” pixel doll site. (Seriously, some of those are just plain creepy.)

I always thought I’d like reviewing books, but don’t have the dedication. I mean, I can read three books in one day if they’re by the right author. But I’m too cheap to buy them from the bookstore, and I’m too lazy to interlibrary loan from the library (working my laziness up for a massive influx of Julia Quinn, who my library only carries in e-books, all of which I’ve read).

Anyway, whether or not my fondness is properly placed, I’m entering the contest in order to get more acquainted with the site itself, because I’d like to be, and because book reviews are good things for people to write and read — yes, they’re good for you! That means you, kids.

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I was at a bookstore near Christmas when I first picked up Harry Potter. We were staying with my grandmother, and the third book had just come out. I decided to break down and buy the paperback of the first one to see what all the hooplah was about. I thought to myself, “Surely this is just a passing fad, something no one will really remember tomorrow.”

I got home, settled by the table, under a lampshade hung round with refracting crystal droplets, and tuned out my chattering family. I opened the book, ready to be disappointed, but hoping to be impressed.

I read the first line very carefully, through mixing emotions: “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”

I stared at the line in the yellowish lamplight, the dark Georgia sky looming in the window over my shoulder, my uncle’s warm laugh providing background noise, and I fell in love.

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