THIS IS JUST ABOUT how I felt when I woke up this morning! Crocky and vicious and horrible. I woke at around 4:30 am feeling like death, thinking of nothing but death and wishing I was dead, or at least dead to the world. What a miserable time to awaken, and it was deathly cold as well. 
Well instead of committing suicide (if I was going to do that I'd have accomplished it years ago) I had a black coffee (early Monday a.m. ~ absolute dog end of the week ~ didn't even have pennies for a pint of milk until 9:05 when the post office finally coughed up)... so meanwhile I went back to my book and scribbled another couple of pages. The further I diverge from my original first draft, the more cheerily I can write it. I hate writing with an old draft in mind, especially if here and there choice phrases pop up ~ that might not even be relevant to the new edition ~ but because they're witty, incisive, well-put or moving I feel I have to somehow include them. And that's stressful. I like to write off the top of my head. Fluently and "effortlessly". 
Thankfully, because I'm writing PROPER (that is "pop") fiction and not "literary" crap I can just talk as I talk and hopefully make my points flowingly and naturally. As I'm sure I said before: I'd far rather write a novel people hide away from houseguests and read alone at night than sells by the cartload than one that wins prizes and gets left on coffee tables to impress friends but is never read and enjoyed. You'd be surprised how many books are bought for just that reason!When I lived (and begged) in a bourgeois area of London, I had a snazzy collection of proof copies of some of the best popular fiction (Harlan coben/etc). These are books distributed to those oh-so-clever folks who fart into beanbags and dream of writing novels of their own. Because they're literarily-minded and have the right connexions they write instead for the books columns in Sunday newspapers etc and dump the unwanted tomes by the score at charity shop doors... which is how I got my hands on them.
Re my computer search I've been trawling reviews till I've notebooks, laptops, tablets, monitors and wireless interfaces spewing out of my ears. I got Computer Active magazine and PC Piddlypop (ie I can't remember what it's called and I would say very informative but actually I've picked up most of the tips they espouse already... so I hope I'm doing well... Finally, I think I've learned the basics ~ how many gigs RAM I need (at least 3), minimum hard drive capacity (at least 250 "gigs" as they say, though a gig to me would be a theatre saying "you're so fascinating we will pay you to sit onstage in a blue velvet armchair under a spotlight reading the London telephone directory" ~ THAT is a gig. But it's also, of course, a gigabyte... Right, anyhow... Yeah.. dual core is good because it means your machine does 2 things at once. It can't be too tiny ~ as I say, I spent ages learning to touch type so the keyboard must be standard size and the screen readable, which means 11.6" absolute minimum... people don't use "floppy" disk drives any more... which was news to me a year ago ~ yes, that is how out of touch I really was. I need a flashdrive memory stick, because obviously you can't keep just one copy, you need backup. And blah and blah and blah... I go to the pc megastore this afternoon, so please wish me luck...Have a great day everyone!
