There was also my big historical project, Tatham Mound; my sweet-sixteen daughter Cheryl was helping excavate the Mound on which the novel was to be based, and I would go out Sunday afternoons to learn new developments.

It's a good and significant project, but those are afternoons that I don't make progress on this current novel. My printer glitched, printing increasingly worse, and we had to have the repairman in to fix it; yet more time expended.

By the end of NoRemember I was exactly halfway through the novel, way behind schedule. Ouch; why so slow?

I made notes on a single day near the end of that three-week slowdown, just to get it straight: NoRemember 19, 1986. I was ready to start on Chapter 6, but was annoyed by a few little glitches in DOS, such as the BACKUP

program that puts all your directories and files on a disk to be saved, but whose RESTORE function simply did not work. Apparently Ms Dos has a RESTORE program, but it had not been implemented on our version of DOS, unbeknownst to the writers of the instructions. That's a cute little oversight that can have decidedly uncute complications; it's like putting all your savings in the bank, then discovering that the bank will not let you take any out when you need it. My wife, after a straggle, finally figured out an alternate way to get the material back, and I wanted to make a note of the exact sequence, so that we would not have to go through this mess again. So I started my own sheet of instructions that included this and all the other deviances and omissions the engineers never bothered to fix. But this took time, because I had to test and double-check everything to be sure there was no error, because in an emergency I had to know exactly what worked. This took an hour and a half. But at least it was done, and I set up to start the chapter—

And the UPS track chose that moment to deliver the Elite font we had ordered. There went another two and a half hours, getting it ironed out. The thing worked well on letter-quality but not on draft-quality printing. Since I use both for my cards, we had to research in the manuals for a special, obscure code to fix that. Any session with a manual is time-consuming, because manuals are scripted by demons in Hell to torment mortals. Then I discovered that the font had no ¢ symbol. Now I use that on some of my cards: I have a macro that prints out a XANTH 2¢

stamp on those cards that don't require mundane postage. What was I to do with no ¢? I finally decided, with bad grace, to substitute the letter c, hoping no one would notice the difference between 2¢ and 2c. Meanwhile I did my three-mile exercise ran, and then took an hour to read the mail, because another pile of letters was in; then I went ahead and used the new font to answer ten of them, washing out the rest of the day. I had never quite gotten down to paying work; Satan had, with magnificent timing, stepped in to introduce some new distraction every time I got close.