It's amazing, it really is.

We moved into our new house a week and a half ago, there are still mountains of boxes waiting to be unpacked and furniture standing in odd, obviously-not-permanent places, we haven't hung a single picture -- but it feels like home. I like it here. Everything we moved here for, we got -- Julie's commute is roughly half an hour shorter, there's a real downtown a mile away, my office is three or four times the size of the old one -- and we also got a friendlier neighborhood and lots of stuff within walking distance.

This morning we went to the Takoma Park farmers' market, which wasn't quite walking distance; we wanted snow peas and didn't find them, but we had a good time and bought and ate some wonderful molasses cookies.

We're just a few blocks from Sligo Creek Park, with its walking and biking trails. We're in walking distance of various city offices, too.

We seem to be getting the benefits of an urban setting with the buses and Metro and downtown areas, the benefits of a rural area with Sligo Creek Park, and the benefits of a small town with our neighborhood and Takoma Park's general attitude, without the worst problems of any of those environments.

(The urban driving's a bit hairy sometimes -- lots of cars on narrow old streets -- but traffic in Gaithersburg wasn't much fun, either.)

I think we're really going to like it here. At least, if it doesn't keep raining so much.

Last Thursday morning my office computer crashed. And wouldn't reboot.

I spent the next three days trying everything I could think of to try to revive it, but in the end I failed. I did manage to get pretty much all my important files copied to an external drive, but I couldn't get Windows back online. Eventually I gave up, and did the whole format-and-reinstall thing.

I didn't lose any documents, and I've managed to reinstall my essential software, but jeez, what a pain. I haven't yet gotten back all my passwords, bookmarks, and so on.

The timing sucked; we're selling this house on Friday and buying a new one a week from today, so there's a lot of paper-shuffling going on, much of it in e-mail, which was suddenly less convenient.

Yes, we have other computers, but SuzyQ isn't online -- we aren't sure what's wrong, but it's been years since she's had a working network connection -- and Iris, my laptop, has no scanner, no printer, and an uncomfortably small keyboard, and is running Vista rather than XP. Vista is a pain. It also isn't terribly stable on Iris, though I think that's more because of stuff Julian did when I let him borrow Iris than because of Microsoft's incompetence.

But we managed, and Chloe's mostly operational again.

Update: Actually, I did lose files -- about sixty, I estimate. I don't think any of them were absolutely vital, but most of the maps of the Walasian Empire went, which may prove inconvenient.

Writers are constantly being asked by would-be authors for advice, and especially for critiques. I'm not sure I entirely get this, as it never occurred to me to ask writers for advice when I was starting out, but it's very common indeed. And the worst thing you can do is to actually provide advice and critiques, because that encourages them -- the more requests you respond to, the more you'll get. It's a bottomless time sink.

I did something that at first glance would seem to be really stupid: I actually put writing advice on my webpage. It doesn't seem to have done any great harm, though -- I get requests for advice, but no more than before I put those pages up. Maybe they figure I've posted everything I have to say.

What sort of advice one is asked for seems to depend on what one is known for. I created another identity back in the 1990s that I used for writing novelizations and spin-offs -- Star Trek novels, a Spider-Man novel, etc. I got requests for advice under that name, same as under the Watt-Evans name, but they were all basically, "How can I get an agent so Paramount/Marvel/Fox/whoever will read my fanfic and buy it?"

In fact, more than half the "fan mail" I ever got under that name boiled down to, "How can I get an agent?" Sometimes they dressed it up with a little flattery; sometimes they didn't bother. And they never asked about how they could make their writing better, or anything -- only about finding an agent because Paramount/Marvel/Fox/etc. didn't read unagented submissions.

Why did they think I would help them find agents?

This all came to mind today because I got e-mail from some kid in England who wanted my advice on whether he should try to become a writer. He sent a chunk of prose to help me decide.

That was the most godawfully overwritten piece I'd seen in many a year, jammed with sesquipedalian words that didn't say quite what their author seemed to want them to say. It wasn't so much a story fragment as an attempt to over-awe the reader with vocabulary, a verbal peacock's tail.

I answered, probably more bluntly than the kid expected -- but thinking about it, why did I bother? He's not going to be grateful. I didn't owe him an answer; he e-mailed me that tripe without warning or invitation. My response was honest, which means it was almost certainly not what he wanted to hear.

One thing I didn't say, though, was that his display of false erudition was utterly typical of a certain sort of beginning writer, the sort who is much more interested in impressing everyone with his brilliance than with actually telling a story or communicating with his readers. You could just feel it -- "Look how many fancy words I know! Isn't my vocabulary amazing? See how smart I am, using words like 'oscillate' and 'perambulate'?"

And I didn't say that partly because it would just make him defensive, but also because if I had, I'd be tempted to admit I went through that phase myself when I was a beginner. Oh, I never had it as bad as he does, but I looked for opportunities to show off all the fine words I had at my command. I took pride in using the word "feculent" in my first novel, for example, and that was when I was well on the road to recovery, about four years after my worst pseudo-Lovecraftian period.

I probably shouldn't have responded at all. Most people just get angry or depressed when I give my honest assessment of their writing.

But then, every so often someone actually listens to my advice. At Free Comic Book Day I ran into someone who said I looked familiar, though I didn't recognize him, and who turned out to be someone who'd asked me for advice back in 2004. He had a connection to the family, so I'd provided a few comments on his writing, and then thought nothing further of it.

His first novel is being published this October.

I can't really take credit for it, because most of what I did was just suggest other places to look for guidance, but apparently he followed my suggestions and got some good out of them.

Sometimes it actually works.

But usually, it's a waste of time.

The thing is... well, in advertising, they say that everyone knows 90% of all advertising is a complete waste of money. The thing is, nobody knows which 90% is a waste, and which is the 10% that'll make you rich.

And I never know which bit of advice will do some good.

But I'll bet today's won't.

I've noticed something.

My income arrives in erratic, unpredictable lumps, often large ones -- it's in the nature of the novel-writing business. This means that I often have several thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars I need to put somewhere, at least temporarily, so I have assorted investments.

Mutual funds are boring, so I have a brokerage account where I actively trade individual stocks. (And in case you're wondering, I did about as well as average over the last year or so -- lost a pot of money, but neither significantly more nor significantly less than I would have by putting the money in an S&P 500 index fund. I think I beat the average by maybe one or two percent, but it depends just how you figure it.)

At the moment I own pieces of about two dozen companies, and this time of year is when I get most of their annual reports. I like annual reports -- in fact, one reason I invest in stocks rather than mutual funds is so I can see the annual reports, where companies get to brag about their accomplishments in glossy color. You can see all these products they market overseas that you didn't know about, pick up odd bits of corporate history, etc.

Except this year, most of the annual reports are remarkably subdued. Instead of grandiose accounts of how Time-Warner is dominating Hollywood, or how Coca-Cola is tailoring dozens of beverages to the tastes of people on every continent, I'm getting just a couple of pages from the CEO saying how tough the year has been, followed by the 10-K on cheap paper. No fold-out displays of happy factory workers, no photo galleries of satisfied customers, no colorful pie charts or product maps or anything.

What fun is that?

We've received the home inspector's report on the house we're buying. He found a total of forty-five deficiencies, most of them minor.

Most of them are stuff we'd have missed, so I think he earned his pay.

Now to see what the seller intends to do about these.

..or rather, the home inspector. We've scheduled the inspection of our theoretical new home for this afternoon. I'm looking forward to getting another, more detailed look at the place.

I was just reminded of this by a Usenet discussion -- I was able to deduct the purchase of an antique saber as a business expense. It's research material. How many jobs are there where you can do that?

The sword in question is an 18th-century shamshir -- Persian blade, North Indian hilt. Common at the time; the Indians didn't have good ore or the expertise to make decent blades, so they'd buy job lots of Persian blades and put pig-iron hilts on them, with leather grips and fancy trim. On mine the leather rotted away long ago, and the trim corroded away or was picked off, but the basic weapon's intact. It's very handy when working out fight scenes.

It's that time of year again. I've posted "An Infinity of Karen" as this year's contribution.

The story was originally published in Amazing in... 1988, I think. The working title was "Eurydice," but I seem to be the only person who ever thought that was a good idea.

In other news, it looks as if both the sake of this house and the purchase of our new one are on track, but I can't say I feel completely confident about either one as yet.

The Red Sox beat the Orioles -- yay! The Marlins beat the Nationals -- again! -- boo!

Chloe's mouse went completely dead, after being unreliable off and on for the past couple of weeks, so I bought a new one at Staples. It's more sensitive than the old one, so it's taking me some time to adjust.

I tried out my new shaving brush. It's much nicer than the old one. I should have switched ages ago.

Our house sold again. The first buyers backed out after the inspection, even though the inspection found only minor problems (and any house, let alone one that's more than twenty years old, has some minor problems), but fortunately there were other interested parties, so we have done the Dance of the Offer and the Counter-Offer, with the Final Flourish of Trivial Addenda, and the house is once again under contract. Let us hope it sticks this time. The inspection is less scary this time, since we know there's no big problem with termites or radon or anything else serious, and the bank says the financing should work.

Now we need to buy a house to move to. The one we want is still on the market, so we'll be making an offer some time this week.

Happy Easter to those who celebrate it, and happy Passover to those who celebrate that, and happy spring to everyone!

(Okay, you folks in the southern hemisphere, happy autumn to you.)

I am pleased to report that Chapter Nine of Realms of Light has finally been posted. I got a nice little donation in my Easter e-mail basket that put it over the top.

For those not already aware of it, I'm also pleased to report that our house is apparently sold; we signed the contract Thursday. Of course, there are still plenty of ways it could go wrong -- the inspection is tomorrow, and the buyer's financing looks good but still needs to be approved, and so on -- but in theory we'll close in mid-May, and have thirty days thereafter to clear out.

And we've found a house we want to buy. Actually, we found three, but two of them sold out from under us. We'll be making a formal offer on the third, which was our first choice anyway, tomorrow, and the seller's agent knows it's coming, so if another bid comes in we'll at least have a chance to match it.

Lots of long-delayed good news there.

In other news, I got a nice check from my French publisher the other day that'll help with closing costs. I've turned in the page proofs for the paperback of The Summer Palace, the copy edit of A Young Man Without Magic is awaiting my attention, and my editor at Tor has received Above His Proper Station. I'm working up a proposal for the next book or two.

On the bad side, my shaving brush self-destructed this morning, which was weird -- tufts of bristle stuck to my face...