Another is those .bat files: these are little programs you type up yourself, saying do this, do that, and then do the other. Then when you summon a bat (it is actually short for "batch"), it flies in on its leathery wings and does the job for you. There is even a vampire bat that invokes itself when you start up, and it takes care of the nuisance about the date and time and path, and anything else you want, right through setting you up with your daily program and files. In short, you can automate, and no longer be bothered with the mundane details.

But learning all the nuances, and adapting to the new ways—that does take time. My work was correspondingly slowed. It was fun learning Ms Dos's intimate little secrets, but I really would have been moving faster with the old familiar Captain. Satan knew that, and kept feeding me new distractions when I threatened to start getting ahead on the novel. For example, I obtained some freeware programs in DOS. Freeware or shareware are programs that you don't have to buy, except sometimes to pay the cost of the disk on which they come, but if you find them useful you may send money anyway; it's the decent thing to do. One was a MAINT program for DOS, so that I could handle my files as readily as I could in CP/M. Another was a Squeeze program that—no, don't get ahead of me, Ms Dos isn't that friendly—enables you to squish files down to about half size for more efficient storage, and to unsqueeze at need. Another was a program to translate files back and forth between MS-DOS and CP/M; that could be handy in our divided family. Nice enough stuff—but my novel was dragging.

Still, I managed to complete the first four chapters in OctOgre, which wasn't too far behind schedule. After all, I had research to do, which is always fascinating but slow. Then I hit a run of distractions, so that Chapter 5 took me three weeks, putting me a couple of weeks behind. What happened? Well, there was that convention I mentioned; 1

only go to one a year, and that was the one this year. Right after that I had to proofread the galleys for one of my novels, and that always takes time because I'm a slow reader and I do it carefully. We also had a morning with the state forester, because we own property we'd like to get classified as a tree farm, but first it has to be surveyed and approved for that. And a day to go to Tampa to meet my new British agent, Pamela Buckmaster. My old agent Leslie Flood, was retiring, and she was taking over his practice, and had flown to Florida just to meet me. Virtually all of my non-American sales will be passing through her, and there was at least one six-figure deal in the offing, so this was a necessary thing. Then another slew of mail struck, taking days to answer; I answered about 385 letters while working on this novel, and though I cram most down to cards, I figure the average letter takes half an hour.