I love to organize. I admit it. That's why the new iMac has me so excited. I'm slowly figuring out how to move my stuff from the PC (let's call it Gandalf the Very Grey, headed soon for the Grey Havens) to the shiny iMac (we call her Galadriel), and now I'm just sitting here at work, after eating WAY too much pie at our department potluck, thinking about how badly I want to get back to the iMac and get her all squared away and organized.

I like categorizing documents and finding the right place for photos and movies and music. Getting it all in folders, properly labeled. Figuring out the best way to keep tons of information at my fingertips, but not spilling all over the place. It's a wonderful way to waste time.

Unfortunately, we're heading out of town tonight, to spend Turkey Day at the beach (Myrtle Beach for Thanksgiving, how surreal!), so I won't get to mess around with Galadriel for three days. Wait, that didn't sound right... Well, you know what I mean.

I was able to quite painlessly move our Quicken files from the PC to the iMac, and thanks to Keith's tip, I'm using the iDisk feature of .mac to move the 350 MB of stuff out of the My Documents folder (after Zipping it all up) on the PC over to Galadriel. I see the light at the end of the tunnel. Once I get the documents and photos and miscellaneous stuff moved, I can wipe the drive and donate the PC to charity. And I Can't Wait!!!

I'm amazed at how EASY it is to move stuff around on the iMac. I swear, using a PC makes you stop trusting computers. Now I have to get used to the fact that when I put somethign on the iMac, it's going to stay there and I'll be able to use it, withouth any problems. What a feeling. It's sort of like what computers are supposed to be like.

Okay, I'll stop gushing now.

And finally, as I get ready to look over the rest of the baseball novel one last time in the next week or two, I've been thinking more and more about language. That seems to be my biggest shortcoming with my novels -- I've got all the "stuff" in place, but the language isn't there.

Well, the language is "there" for the opening three chapters, for sure -- I worked over those sections over and over in the past few weeks (so I could send 'em off to agents). In the later chapters, I worry that I'm not doing as much as I could, with setting scenes or experimenting more or using more voice. I'm still too full of pie and other goodies to think this through, but I'm looking forward to flipping through some various books to see how other authors set up their chapters and scenes. See what sort of tricks they do with language. Well, maybe "tricks" isn't the right word. Obviously, my own language in this journal entry isn't working well for me right now...

Have a great week! Later.