Roadblocks

"It's not that I'm lazy ..." -- Peter Gibbons, Office Space

The last year, personally and professionally, has been nuts. Normally, this is the kind of post you write in January, but I’m hitting that cathartic point in August, this year.

At work, we kicked off a project in September that went into production on August 1. With the exception of a few digital whack-a-moles, my team’s side of the endeavor was pretty much solid, and now begins the glide path back into normal workflow. After 11 months of long days and brain-frying Teams meetings, I’m having a hard time remembering what that looked like. My calendar on Friday was … completely empty, and I’d by lying if I didn’t say that I had a quick moment of panic, thinking something was wrong with our connection to Microsoft 365.

On the personal side, my youngest started high school, and my oldest completed his senior year. On the surface, that seems straightforward enough, but graduation party plans, college visits, car shopping, financial aid paperwork, more college visits, all combined with the mental gyrations associated with realizing that your baby is growing up … whew. All of it blurred into Welcome Weekend, and as I type this my son is an official college freshman.

Not a lot of talk of writing in there, is there?

I’ve made a little progress on A Place for Peace and The Shadow Factory, but I’d by lying if I didn’t admit that I pretty much whiffed on my personal goals. After Vital Breath dropped about a year ago, I told myself I’d have both of them done by right about now. That didn’t happen.

At the same time, the AI slop tsunami seems to have hit Amazon, and sales have not been great. My day-job, thankfully, is a great career, so I don’t have to worry about books paying the pills, but it’s kinda nice, you know? (Especially with a kid in college and another one on the precipice.) In terms of roadblocks, this is more of a speed bump than anything else, but I’m just laying out how my head works, here.

More annoying? My Lenovo Yoga 7i.

Didn’t expect this to turn into a product review, did you?

I’ve worked in IT for longer than I should probably admit, and one of the little idiosyncrasies I’ve picked up along the way is a preference for metal laptops. Too many bad experiences with plastic ones breaking, including a Compaq that literally shattered inside of a padded bag when I wiped out on an icy sidewalk. Theoretically, the Yoga should check all of my boxes. Big, bright screen, full-sized keyboard, and a metal frame.

But what makes a Yoga a Yoga, apparently, is a feature that has been the literal bane of my existence for the last few months. The screen can be flipped entirely around to rest against the bottom of the laptop, forming a massive, touchscreen tablet. Neat, I guess. Not a feature I’ll ever really need. When you engage this feature, a sensor in the laptop switches off the keyboard and trackpad. Or at least, it’s supposed to.

You can imagine the frustration I’ve felt, packing up my laptop to go write, sitting down in the coffee shop, opening it up … and finding that the keyboard and trackpad are not working.

Why? I have no idea. The only times I’ve actually engaged the flip feature on the stupid thing has been during troubleshooting to try and make the keyboard and trackpad work. Registry edits, OS reinstalls, and service toggling have all worked, or not worked, for intermittent periods of time, but never reliably enough for my satisfaction, and the little gremlin always seemed to pop up when I had the itch to write. It doesn’t seem to be an actual hardware issue, and it doesn’t help that Microsoft has removed the tablet mode “toggle” from Windows 11 completely. (“You don’t need it! The device will auto switch!”)

So, yeah. The last thing I want to do after ten or eleven hours of messing with Linux and Windows servers is to come home and … have to fix another computer.

All of those combined roadblocks made me honestly reconsider my writing career, and this post might very have been a “so long, and thanks for all the fish" but for a couple things that happened in the last few days.

First and foremost, I got an e-mail from a reader. Nothing crazy, just a simple thanks. It can’t be stated how much of a boost that sort of thing is. In a world where mass communication is just a Tweet or post away, it can sometimes feel like screaming into the void. The feedback that you’re not just spinning your wheels is unmeasurable.

Second, while bringing some final touches into my son’s dorm, something hit me—I did college at night, so I didn’t have the true campus experience-—about the things that he and his roommate brought along. Their room is pretty much their lifeboat. Neither of them can just run home and grab something, so they’re bringing things they need, or to be more comfortable.

My son’s roommate had a couple Brandon Sanderson boxsets on his bookshelf. One still sealed, the other opened—if he’s going to binge Mistborn, I hope he still has time for homework.

My son had a couple graphic novels and Witcher books he picked up at Books a Million. But one of the books he brought from home? A Place Outside the Wild, because he wants to read the Z-Day series since he finished the Pax books. On our way to lunch, he asked me how writing was going,. I had to admit that it wasn’t great—and it’s pretty easy to ignore a teenager’s judging look unless he’s got a point.

So, yeah. In terms of a kick in the pants, that was a solid one. And so I sign off for now, with a ‘more to come.’