Stephen W. Cote's Bloghttp://www.whitefrost.com/Blog/steve/RSS/en-us4320 Sun, 04 Dec 2011 11:54:01 GMT http://www.whitefrost.com/Blog/steve/Silence is Good I've used virtual machines for development for quite a while, but when it came to hosting I left the [url=http://www.whitefrost.com]whitefrost.com[/url] domain (and a few strays still routing here) on an old Dell workstation. The Dell held up well for nine years, but not without its share of hardware faults. The CD drive stopped working long ago, the CMOS battery is dead, the SCSI disks are fickle and noisy, and the fan competed with the disks for noisiest hardware. But, it chugged along and that says something about the quality. Fri, 20 May 2011 12:09:45 GMT http://www.whitefrost.com/Blog/steve/Secondhand Fantasy Recently, I finished the second draft of a fantasy novel. The condensed plot: A sorcerer assists the undead to prevent a terrorist attack, becomes embroiled in the politics of war, and learns corrupt governments need not be fought with revolution and cannot be fought with absentee citizens. I think the second draft turned out quite nicely, with help from a number of people including the fine folks at [url=http://www.litopia.com]Litopia[/url]. In the falling action, several cabals affecting the protagonist are identified, and all plot lines button-up with the narrative timelines and politics. But, one does not write a second draft without a first. Wed, 16 Mar 2011 14:50:40 GMT http://www.whitefrost.com/Blog/steve/Writing Score It's late. It's dark. Some elect atmospheric silence as their writing companion. After a while such monotony infects my prose. Leaves sweep streets on breezy surf; Raindrops patter window panes; Wind sings to a tree bow accompaniment. Waves of traffic roll on paved shores and a distant waterfall thunders in full, or a semi slows traffic on the parkway. The natural jazz is rich and distracting. But I struggle to find the right voice and inspiration in such noisy silence.