Silver Suffer

The Silver Surfer project continues.

I finally managed to get a replacement bolt in place to secure the carriage return lever. Just to recap, here's what the business end of the carriage looked like "before," after I'd carelessly sheared the bolt in two while trying to tighten the mechanism down.




And here's the replacement bolt in place, approximately the same length, and mercifully, the same threading as the bolt it replaced. So now all I need to do is put the lever on and tighten (carefully!) the nuts that hold it in place, right?

Right?

What do you mean, "no?"



Well, no. When I fasten the lever in place, it doesn't stay put. Since this is a travel machine, the return lever folds down for transport, and then snaps upright for use. But the "snaps upright" part isn't happening. If your name happens to rhyme with "Pitchard Bolt" then you surely have seen it already...

That little hole you can see there, in that angled bit of metal? Yeah, that? That is supposed to hold a teeny-tiny little ball bearing, which presses against the return arm and provides enough friction to keep it in the stowed position. The return arm has a smaller hole through it which the ball bearing pops into and acts as a lock. It's a really clever system, and obviously far more clever than I am, he who blinding removed the arm without paying attention to tiny round Important Parts that likely went pinging around the room someplace.

In short: dammit.

So, I'm off to see if I can source a tiny, tiny ball bearing. Small enough to fit into this hole, but not so small that it passes through the return lever's hole. That's the bad news.

The good news is: I wouldn't have been able to puzzle any of this out without a working example of the same mechanism to compare. (Installing the bolt meant removing the whole piece, including a spring under tension.) But I won't tip my hand about that quite yet.

Edit:

There was some discussion in the comments about how tiny the "tiny, tiny ball bearing" actually is. Based on some shaky camera work, I'd guess it's a 2mm size, or pretty close to it. I'm going to see if the craft store has any metal beads that might fit the bill.

At the Half

Page-and-day-wise, I just crossed the halfway point in my NaNoWriMo 2009 transcription, a mere (counting on fingers) four and a half months after finishing the draft in the first place. And I still consider this the "beginning" of the story, which either means I've rushed the back half, or hopelessly padded the front, or both, most likely.

Slow and steady, slow and steady... but mostly just slow.



I'm trying to complete it before the expiration date for the "free proof copy" offer occurs, because I'd like to actually see this once through to completion. This may have to wait until 2011 for the 2010 offer, though. At least I'm planning ahead.

Anyone else making slow headway on a creative endeavor? I could use some cheerleading and/or mutual support.

More Twitting

Ah, I get it now.

A month ago I signed up for Twitter as a means to vote in the "Shorty Awards," a.k.a. a hunk of engraved lucite given to notable twits in various categories -- the Twitter Oscars, it's been called. I saw it as a way to show a little love to the few tweets that I actually do read on occasion, namely those "by" the various interplanetary probes sent out by NASA/JPL, especially the pair of rovers on Mars, operating years beyond their original mission and design. (I'm a space and science geek on top of everything else.) So anyway: signed up, and put my toe in the water, expecting to find it a barren wasteland of 140-character blips from people calling themselves "Snooki" who want to know yo where my ho's at or whatever.

Well, it is that, truly, but then so is the blogspace and the Internet at large. (This is the point when I usually slip into the "I remember the 'MAKE MONEY FAST' Usenet wars" story, but I'll spare you.) In fact, the Internet is pretty much a "seek and you shall find" proposition. I had no idea that the nascent typosphere was out here lurking in the shadows, until I stumbled on Will Davis' portable typewriters site, and then the Yahoo! group, and then Strikethru and Monda's blogs. I'm glad that I fell into it, and broke my own (unspoken) rule of "I won't have a blog, I don't see the point, I don't know who would even bother reading it, grumpy grumpy, stay off my lawn." Now I'm pleased to be in your virtual company, and am finding a lot of similarities with you folks, despite geography.

Well, I was wrong about Twitter, too. It can be a means for shameless celebrity-watching, which I'll own up to: I'm following the MythBusters, and Wil Wheaton, and Conan O'Brien's daily tweets (depressing and funny!) and a few others. And I'll admit, that it's a bit like eavesdropping on a conversation at a party, but then the likelihood of me even being at a genuine in Real Life party with these people is slim to none, so I'm enjoying it. (To be fair, the MythBusters are just across the Bay from me, and I could realistically go all creepy-stalker on them if I wanted to. But they also have guns and explosives, so... no.) And then I stumbled across Rogert Ebert.

I "know" Ebert from his days reviewing movies on TV, and from his excellent reviews and Q&A columns now posted online. I know about his cancer battle, and read the recent Esquire profile, and for fun, looked him up. And this is where I realized I was wrong.

Yes, Twitter can be an extended game of "Yes, and..." where jokes (and one-ups) zip back and forth among friends and strangers, in a sudden ephemeral cloud of words, and yes, it can all-to-often be an outlet for inane "I just ate a sandwich" updates. I've been guilty of a couple of these myself, as the guilt settles in for not updating "enough," as if there were a minimum participation level that I was failing to reach. It's all of these things, but it's also a chance to listen in on short bursts of thought from people like Roger Ebert, and Neil Gaiman, and Stephen Fry, and the like. Your tastes might very from mine -- Ebert is almost furiously liberal, based on his responses to Tea Party folks and Sarah Palin -- but chances are you'll find someone out there to listen to. For someone like Ebert, whose living is based on the written words, it's a pleasure to watch someone work, confined within the limits of the service. (He compared it to a word game: packing the most meaning in the least space.)

So there, I was wrong. And I'm willing to own up to it. But I'm still not following anyone named "Snooki."

Stairclimbing

I know that 50K is just an arbitrary number, a Big Round Figure that's supposed to be huge and scary and cast in unobtanium and all, but it's a great goal. If anything, it's a testament to the power of erosion: of the rippling effect that regular small-scale chipping away can do. 50,000 is a big solid slab of text, but picked apart by word, line, and page, it's completely reasonable. Last year, I couldn't fathom how anyone could not only beat NaNo early, but then go on to set such crazy goals like 100K, 250K, 500K, or 1 million words in a month. (Actually, I'm still out on that last issue. One million? You people are crazy.)

So here I am, green bar on the site, little "winner" dingus on the name badges. A nagging part of me still thinks I've over-estimated my word count, but there's plenty of story left that needs writing between now and the end of November, especially if I want to claim my prizes. There's a lot of roughness going on, but at the same time I'm surprised by the turns the characters are taking, the plot elements that are unfolding within the loose cat's-cradle framework that I've laid out. I'll have to write up a recap when I'm all done-for-real-done, but when it comes to regular writing on a typewriter, I'm a believer.