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NEWS AND VIEWS - NOVEMBER 2019
WRITING NEWS Don't have a lot of writing news this month. I submitted my latest novel, The Demon in the Metal, to one of the big publishers a few weeks ago, but I don't expect to hear back from them anytime soon. In the meantime, I've been working on the outline for the sequel, called The Brassfire Fleet, and playing around with some ideas for some shorter Signalverse novels. I know I said I was going to step away from the Signalverse for a while, but after writing this big fantasy I'm feeling like a change of pace, and I'm getting pretty excited about two Signalverse stories in particular: Sneak and The White Ribbon and the Heart of the Night. I think these could be pretty good, and I don't think it would take me all that long to write them. Apart from that, there's not much going on. * * * * * * * * WINDOWS 7 I don't know what I'm going to do when Microsoft ends support for Windows 7 in January. I have several PC's, some old, some new, but my primary PC, the one I do most of my work on, has Windows 7, and I like it just the way it is; it's basically an extension of my brain at this point. I don't want to buy a new PC, and I don't want to "upgrade" to Windows 10, partly because of all the nagware and privacy issues, which I'm convinced are only going to get worse, and partly because 10, in my opinion, just isn't as intuitive as 7. Plus I've got a bunch of old applications on this Windows 7 PC that won't work well (or at all) in 10. (I still use the no-frills XP version of WordPad to do most of my writing, for instance.) So what are my options? Well, I could start using my gaming PC, which has Windows 10 installed, as my primary computer, but I don't really want to do that. I could continue using my Windows 7 PC for day-to-day stuff, and just avoid going online with it, but that would be very, very inconvenient; having to fire up another PC, just to get online, would be a pain in the neck, and running two desktops at the same time is just wasteful. I could install Linux on my primary PC as a dual boot, and use that to get online, but I'd have to reboot whenever I wanted to switch back to Windows 7 -- another inconvenience. Windows 8? No, thanks. That's just kicking the can a little further down the road. In the past it was possible to just wait for a better Windows OS. If ME sucked, just wait for XP. If Vista sucked, just wait for Windows 7. But Windows 10 is Microsoft's final OS, allegedly; there's nowhere to go from here if you're a Windows user and you don't like 10. Ugh. * * * * * * * * WHAT I'M PLAYING Still working my way through Fire Emblem: Three Houses, which I started months ago. It's kind of a long game, and even though I'm enjoying it, I haven't really been playing it all that often (I've been preoccupied lately with The Demon in the Metal). I also fired up Castlevania: Rondo of Blood a few days ago, on a whim -- I'd never played it before -- but I don't expect to get very far with it; it's hard, and I don't really have the patience for these kinds of games anymore anyway. I'm an old man with slow reflexes. I'll probably tackle Trails of Cold Steel III after I finish up Fire Emblem; then it's on to the Grandia remaster for the Switch and hopefully the fan-translated version of Zero no Kiseki, which is apparently only a few months away. I figure these ought to carry me through most of 2020. * * * * * * * * CHRONTENDO! New Chrontendo! Dr. Sparkle plays Castlevania III in this one.
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