Report from the word mines

Slow but reasonably consistent progress so far this week. Running totals as follows: Sunday 20923, Monday 21005, Tuesday, 21104, Wednesday 21262, Thursday 21408, Friday 21511, which took it to the end of the sex scene. Which means that no, it's not a very long sex scene. I could try to expand it, but I fear that it would be padding. Probably better to leave it be and wait for the next one, which will probably be a somewhat more considered exercise from the characters' POV.

I also probably need to go back at some point and add a bit of descriptive wordage to the rest of the story, because once again I am demonstrating that I hear my fiction as a radio play, rather than seeing it as a film. It's not as bad as the first draft of Ship to Shore, but it's still too light on visual description for readers who are more visually orientated than I am.

Psion battery life

I've barely used the new (to me) Psion a friend gave me three months ago, because not long after that I started getting some nasty medication side-effects which meant that I had to minimise my keyboard use, especially anything not on an ergonomic keyboard. But yesterday I pulled it out on the bus to type up last night's (f-locked) post about lunchtime silliness at work. The fresh alkaline batteries I'd put in exactly three months earlier had finally drained to the point where it wouldn't let me save any new work, although it hadn't quite switched to the back-up to preserve the settings in RAM. That's almost entirely standby use, as according to the battery log screen I'd only used it for 3 and a bit hours during that time. But getting 3 months of standby out of one set of alkaline AAs is one of the reasons I liked these little machines in the first place. They were extremely practical for travelling, because of the long battery life and ease of replacing batteries with off-the-shelf if you weren't anywhere near a suitable power point. (Indeed, I've never used one on a power supply other than to check the power port was still working.) And indeed, what I did was pull out the spare set and change the batteries before merrily typing away.

As for the typing on the bus -- slow but feasible now that I have one with a keyboard in good working order. It's not going to get used every day, but it is extremely useful to have it in my backpack if I think of something I want to make notes on. I need to pull off my notes on the production of Edward II which kalypso_v and I went to see last week.