I found instructions from a couple years ago to include a non-printing abstract and keywords for each chapter.

More work before it's ALL DONE, but it's close.

The trip to Texas started with a trip to Inconjunction in Indianapolis.

Incon is one of my favorite SF conventions. (OK, they're all my favorites. If I wasn't having fun, I could stay home and write chapter summaries.) (Yeah, that's a low bar. )

When I walked into the dealer's hall one of the small press publishers, (Per Bastet) that I spoke with last year, waved at me. "We were hoping you'd be here. We read your book and we'd like to publish the sequel!"

I spent some time chatting with them. They offer good terms for royalties, and have a decent cover designer. But they only hit a few conventions a year.

My drive to Texas was fairly uneventful. The weather was a bit more than damp, but I missed all the nasty flood areas.

I drove about 11 hours from Indianapolis, which put me about 90 minutes north of Dallas.

I found what Roger Miller's King of the Road described as an 8x12 4 bit room. These days, everything runs on 64 bits, so I paid significantly more than 50 cents. But the room was otherwise about the same. Suitable for a few hours sleep, and that's all I wanted out of it.

This motel was 1940's or maybe even 1930's vintage, back when motels were a row of rooms with space to park one car in front of each door. With my nudging close to the room's door, I plugged my charge cord into the room's light socket and ran it across the sidewalk to my car.

I had to leave the door slightly ajar, but this didn't feel like the kind of place where that much mattered. I was in more danger of finding a scorpion or spider in my shoes than being attacked by a madman with a chainsaw.

By dawn, I had twenty miles of charge in the car. Not a lot, but enough so the car could balance between the using the gas engine or battery.

I spent a week visiting my mom and upgrading her computer.

When I first started with computers, disks drives cost tens of thousands of dollars for about 5 megabytes. Space was valuable. We used every last byte, and paid extra for a reliable (flag-free) disk.

If you just looked at those disks too hard, or jiggled the drive, you could inscribe a cool silver racing stripe onto the disk. It wouldn't work any more, but it was cool techno-art you could hang on your wall.

By the early 2000's, disks were large, cheap and much more reliable.

But you could still wear one out, or have a power surge or such.

So folks invented the idea of RAID - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.

The idea is that instead of having one big disk, you have 2, 3 or even 4 smaller disks, and you'd write the same data onto each drive so if one disk failed, you'd still have one working.

So I put all my mom's geneology data on a new pair of RAID disks, and all was well.

Mostly.

Kipling said there were 9 and 60 ways for composing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right.

There are probably ten times that many ways to configure a system, and 9 and 90 of them *almost* work.

The good news is that of those 9 and 90 ways that don't work, hundreds of folks have tried each of them and bitched about it on the internet, and then explained how they worked around hardware that won't even talk to itself.

Between the internet, a new disk drive to hold backups, and a lot of profanities, I got my mom's new system all working by Saturday afternoon, and she even had time to test things before I left on Sunday.