The Marshmallow Ranch Gazette (Patreon)

Howdy, patrons!

Last week, I made a promise to myself to treat my writing like a part-time job. At LEAST 10 hours a week, rain or shine, no matter what was going on. If I wanted to be a serious writer, I was going to have to work at it -- and that work requires discipline and sacrifice.

I made up a schedule last week that I completely didn't stick to, I'll have you know! This week is a little better -- I've stuck closer to my schedule but I'm still behind. Why was it so hard to maintain my discipline and keep up my projects as long as I meant to?

Well, you may know that I've been having problems with tech for the past month and a half, and though I'm nearly at the end of the rough patch there's still one last hump to get over. My desktop, I think, is all squared away. I've installed the solid-state drive, cleaned out the innards and now Bigwig (my desktop) works like a dream. At some point, I'll want to take everything out, make sure everything is seated properly and do something better with the rat's nest of wires and cords in there, but it'll keep for now.

I also got my Dell laptop over the weekend! It's a beauty -- the Inspiron 7000 15", which is basically Dell's only non-Alienware gaming set. It's got an i7 Intel processor, a 1 TB HDD, 16 G of RAM and an insane ultra-HD touchscreen. I'm in love with it! BUT you didn't think it would be that easy for me, did you??

Last weekend I was on call, so I didn't have much time or spoons to write or deal with setting up the laptop. On the advice of a friend in the know, I bought another solid-state drive to install -- the Samsung EVO 500GB. It's small enough to fit into the ultrabook-style laptop and should improve the performance/speed of the laptop quite a bit. It's a bit overkill considering the already *really* impressive computer out of the gate, but I thought it would be a good thing to do. The laptop would, more or less, be a miniature version of my desktop and optimized for writing! It'd run cooler, which means I could take it to bed and write there; it could sort of replace my very old tablet for comic or Kindle reading.

But alas, it looks like it's not meant to be. It's taken me several days to format the SSD, clone the Windows installation to it, upgrade to Windows 10 and finally take the laptop apart to install it. Now, Windows *refuses* to boot and I can't repair, refresh (where you install the OS but keep your files) or reset (where you re-install the OS and blow everything else away) the PC. I can't even simply re-install Windows using the installation disk!

Looking online, I've found that this seems to be a fairly common problem with Dell laptops and Windows 10. Most of the forums seem to say that this is just not resolvable, but I have a lead that I think I can pin down. It looks like there's a distinct problem with UEFI (it's like this way for the OS to interact with the laptop's firmware) and how it manages the boot. We'll see if the fix for that helps, but if it doesn't I'll probably just leave in the 1 TB HDD and call it a day.

This is all to say that technical problems are still keeping me from writing, longer than I intended, and while there is every plan to have part 11 of THE CULT OF MAXIMUS up and running it might be a day late (Friday instead of Thursday). Marshmallows for May will come closer to the end of the month, and I'm sorry for that.

Other than that, things are great here at the Marshmallow Ranch! Hope you folks are having a great week. See you later on for more adventures of Tom and Spike!