Heir To Magic

I’ve been so fried out and frazzled that you would not even believe it.  The past few months I have been on a very fine line between “I’m doing good” and screaming and throwing things at walls.  It’s not helping my sanity any to sit here in the house and look around and know that if something happens to my dad that … that’s it.  I pack up whatever I can manage to fit into a few boxes and tuck it into the trunk of the car and…

And what.  I have about $200 I could scrape together and no hope of beingable to get approved for a loan to save my parents house.  I can’t even afford an airline ticket to somewhere warm enough to camp out until I could afford rent on a low rent apartment.  Forget being able to take my dogs with me.  I would have to leave me, mom and dad’s dogs with someone else.  The Wookie would last about a week then die of stress.

So, if I don’t seem to be keeping this blog updated, if I seem to have flipped off NaNoWriMo, if I seem to have stopped working on Heir to Magic — I have other things on my mind.  I’m trying to think of how I can save my parents house and pounding my head against a wall.

I got my desktop computer back home, finally!  I loaded back up my writing programs last night and the night before and will get Heir to Magic loaded back on it tonight.  It is sooooo nice to have it back home where it belongs, trying to balance work and protecting my laptop from being burned up from overuse was not easy.

Most importantly, I can now get back to  my writing course, which I have been missing so very very much.

It seems like I have lost about three days over the past two days.  One step forward, two steps back and all that jazz.  My ability to focus seems to be non-existent, so, of course, the muse is as equally non-existent.  I need to get things sorted out and start really working my butt off on my novel, but I need to wait until I get my desktop back from HP before I can do that.

You heard that tale, didn’t you?  My computer malfunctioned and had to be sent back to HP to have them retattoo the mother board or something like that.  I don’t expect to get it back before probably Friday at the earliest, probably the next Friday if I am lucky.  Until then I am getting as much work done each day as I can using my laptop and trying not to burn it out using it as a desktop.

Okay, I have been working on a book I want to handbind and sell rather than on Heir to Magic, I admit it.  I’m hoping that by starting up bookbinding as a second home business I will be better able to raise the money that I need to raise to help me save my parents’ house.  I have a lot of money to raise, and a LOT of work ahead of me, but I am not about to give up until someone comes out here and bodily evicts me from the property.  Even then, I doubt I will give up trying to save my parents’ house.

I am looking for a good program that can be used to make decent maps for my novel’s world.  I don’t need anything fancy, just like a gamer’s cartography program of some kind would work for now.  I considered creating the map in GIMP and will probably resort to that, but I would really like something that would let me have some kind of comparison on scale for how far apart things are and such.

Eventually I want to create an interactive map that I can use to click on a town and call up information I need to know for my stories or where I can click on a dungeon and it will give me the images and floor plan for that dungeon including a history and who/what lives there now.  So far the only group I can think of that might have programs that would do what I want are the gamers.