Unlimited Mobile-to-Mobile... Just... not Quite so Unlimited

So, I have a plan with AT&T Wireless that includes unlimited mobile-to-mobile minutes. Awesome, I thought, now I can call other AT&T mobile people and not get charged. Great! All the stuff on the web says it - unlimited mobile-to-mobile with other AT&T customers, yada yada. Cool!

Come to find out what they don't tell you on the website, or anywhere other than hidden in the written contract somewhere (I didn't ask them to re-send it, I don't care enough), is that during nights and weekends, they pull the minutes from your Night and Weekend pool first ... so what this means for the unsuspecting caller is that if you make a bazillion night and weekend calls even to another AT&T Wireless customer, and you don't have an unlimited night and weekend plan (I don't, for example), it'll blow through your limited night and weekend minutes.

Then, later, when you make a night and weekend call to someone who's not on a cell phone and expect it to be free, since it's coming from your night-and-weekend pool, it costs money because you blew through your pool with the "unlimited" mobile-to-mobile.

Luckily, this didn't burn me - I have 5000 night and weekend minutes and usually only burn through about 3500 in any given month. But, if I'd wasted them all and then been charged, I would have been pretty annoyed. In fact, it's still pretty annoying; they should have this on their website clearly announced that "unlimited mobile to mobile is only charged if and only if the call doesn't occur on a night/weekend time period."

Pretty lame. Then again, that's what mobile companies do these days - dick you over and mislead you. Fun fun.

Anyway, a lot of people probably knew this, and it's probably already common knowledge and I'm one of the few who didn't know - but for those who didn't realize it (all 3 of you reading), just make sure to check your minute usage on your cellphone bills to make sure you're not burning through your night and weekend minutes accidentally.

Thanks, AT&T Wireless! You rule!

Whine, Whine, Whine...

So, I'm still not exactly "writing" my books, per se, but I did find an interesting problem when I upgraded to MS Word 2007 (and 2008 for the Mac): the new DOCX format (their XML-based format) is nice because it shrinks the size of your files in general. I went from upwards of 1MB per document, down to about 400KB or so... not too shabby.

Unfortunately, it also randomly removes the spaces in between words on the screen, and doesn't seem to see an issue with this. Basically, it would print out the sentence The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog as The quickbrown fox jumped overthe lazy dog, and it wouldn't consider quick and brown as one big misspelled word.

So in effect, if I were to print this, my books would look riddled with space-caused spelling errors, which not even the spell-checker could find and fix for me. I'd have to go proofread all the books again and find these stupid things and fix them - which, FYI, actually embeds two spaces in between the word when you look at it or convert it or whatnot.

The net result of all this? I ditched the DOCX format and am back to the old DOC format from MS Word 2003 and prior. Ugh. How annoying is that?

Creative Roadblocks

So, this is allegedly supposed to be (going to be?) my blog for keeping track of what I'm doing on my book(s), but I haven't actually posted anything here that's related to writing.

Of course, most of this is because for the past year, I've been languishing in a mire of major writer's block, and unable to think of how to work through the novel I'm writing - currently, the third book in my series.

It's kind of difficult to explain why it's so hard to write. I mean, I can visualize what should happen, and even see it happening - just as if I was watching a movie in my head. I can hear the voices, see the action, visualize the dialogue... all of it. The problem is that I can't get from Point A to Point B successfully.

It's kind of tough for me, since I tend to think in terms of "storyline events." I see a plot point and work it out, but then I have to come up with filler in between those events... and that's where my problem has been. I'm in the third book now and had an event, and am working toward the next one... but I have to fill in the intervening time. Sure, I could just do a "And so, three months later...", but that's relatively cheesy.

And, I might need to do that later, so I want to save that as my ace in the sleeve.

So for now, I'm stumped on the third book - unable to figure out how to wrap up the filler between plot points. Yuck. I'll figure it out eventually, but I guess for now what I'm going to do is focus on the prequel.

Overall, this is probably a better idea anyway. After all, I want to get published. Most publishers want to make money without spending too much. I've never been published. Therefore, most publishers wouldn't want to spend much money on me, an unpublished author, if they didn't have assurance I'd make them any. It's logical. They need less risk, I think... and a five-book series from a first-time publisher is a bit risky, generally speaking. I'm guessing maybe that's one big deterrent as to why the publishers don't want to pick up my books/series***.

I'll write the one-off prequel, in the same world with some of the same characters, set seven years prior to my series. It'll stand on its own, but it'll be connected, so that if the prequel is picked up and sells, I can hit up the publisher and say, "Hey... I got five more where that came from in a series..." and see how it goes.

So that's my plan, in a nutshell. I'm re-editing the prequel now, what I have of it - about five chapters worth, all focused on one particular character at this point. Once it's edited and looking satisfactory, I'll write the chapters for the other main character, and then alternate them into place and make sure it's not too jarring switching back and forth. Then I'll start writing up the rest of that book, prettying it up, and eventually soliciting it around.

I'll keep notes here about it as I go, with various writing labels to track the subject matter. Who knows, maybe someone will actually read these.

Maybe not, but who cares; it gives me something to do...

---

Footnotes:
*** Yeah, that or it sucks.

Oh yeah. The new office! Well, cubicle...

Ah. And here's the new cube I moved to, along with my computer, phone, and one of my whiteboards. Awesome!

Not seen here is the other whiteboard, off to the right ---> which is even larger and more impressive than this somewhat small one. Also ignore the fact that there's no writing on the whiteboard. I would have written hi, but didn't think about it.

Snazzilicious, I'm telling you...

The Previous Post

Yeah. If anyone actually read this, I probably would have felt a little bad about the stupid previous post... the one with the picture of my keyboard (oh boy, a nice Logitech Wave keyboard and my iMac!) and a nonsense message.

But you have to realize, the reason for it was because it's taken me almost 2 days to figure out how the heck to get my stupid Blackberry email to stop appending "Sent from (horrible mobile phone company whose name sounds suspiciously like P-mobile) Blackberry" to my phone-to-blog messages... which made it really embarrassing to post anything.

Finally I figured it out, and that's the exciting and thrilling keyboard-n-iMac photo you see there. Aren't you thrilled? I know I am. So, what does this mean for you?

Absolutely nothing. Namely because there are no "you" reading this... at least none that I know of. So I'm pretty much talking to myself here... slow day, I guess.