My favorite local coffee shop is changing ownership! The owner is selling his business to a chain. As of this week, the menu offerings, staff, and atmosphere will be completely different. No more local art and photography on the walls. No more chats with the employees and owner when things are slow.

I’m rather bummed, as the owner was one of the people who encouraged me to get out of the full-time corporate rat race. It’s not something everyone can or wants to do, but it turned out to be 100% the right move for me. I’ve given him a copy of each of my books since they were published. I spent many hours tinkering with and thinking about (read: agonizing) said books at his coffee shop. It was only fair to share the rewards with him! I hope we can keep in touch in some other way.

In the meantime, I’ll have to figure out how to airlift cappuccino from Rome to the US.

Writing Updates

I do my work on a 2016 MacBook Pro—which, as you might know, is a hardware line that’s been plagued with problems. Aside from all the marks on my screen that won’t go away, I’ve been pretty lucky so far. Unfortunately, I’ve finally run into the dreaded butterfly keyboard malfunction: my return/enter key will no longer go down. It still works when I press on it, and I suppose I should be thankful for that (lol), but it’s concerning. It’s certainly not a key I can work around, and there’s every indication that other keys, especially the space bar, are similarly vulnerable.

Apple was previously charging people up to $700 for repairs, which is insane. They’ve now begun to offer free repairs, which is better, but they take your laptop and ship it off who-knows-where, which would leave me out of commission for days. At this point, I’m not desperate enough. I have an external keyboard that I’ll be using more often to avoid exacerbating the problem. When it gets untenable, I’ll go back to examining repair options.

This will probably be my last bit of Apple hardware. I’ve loved my MacBooks up until now, but the hardware has taken a real nosedive in quality. Since Windows 10 is undeniably the product of Satan’s asshole, I’m not switching to that. It seems my best alternative will be some flavor of Linux. My most mission-critical software—like Scrivener, Sigil, and LibreOffice—all runs on Linux just fine. There are some nifty Linux hardware options out there that I’ll scope out in more detail when the time comes.

So, anyway … Book 3! LOL Starting with about 105K words of drafted material and accompanying notes, I’m “taking it from the top,” returning to Chapter 1 to rewrite stuff that’s been obsoleted and create a clean, coherent draft that I’ll be able to put in my editor’s hands. Will I be able to finish it by the end of this year, as I’ve been targeting? I’ll be working on a timeline that, if met, would help me finish with time to spare. However, I don’t know if it’s realistic or not! I may have to give it up if it’s causing me to stress out. We’ll see!

Current Goals

Well-rounded Latin practice. Studying vocabulary flashcards daily, textbook work and conjugation/declension practice most days, listening to a podcast episode and writing a response to it once a week.

Listening to German. This happens a couple times a week. I’ll also study the vocab and read the transcript out loud.

I gotta start thinking about what else I want to work on …! :)

That’s all for now! Hope you’re also having a good summer so far!