The State of the Author is…complicated. On April 9, 2026, I finished the first draft of a murder mystery, ran my DevEditor automation on it, and discovered that it really needed more physical evidence pointing towards the murderer, and more clues in general. The early chapters mostly just needed fairly modest rewrites for tone and emotional content, so I got to work on those right away, figuring that the subconscious would work on the complicated stuff next time I pivoted to one of the WIPs, either Space & Sensibility or HHK0.

On April 11, 2026, my XPS 8700, which I bought twelve-ish years ago, locked up while I was revising Chapter Four of the mystery, and never recovered. The computer store diagnosed a failing mechanical hard drive, and transferred the computer’s files (not its OS) to an SSD I bought, which took four days. Did I mention that I’d been having intermittent lower back muscle pain for a few weeks at that point? Although the 8700 doesn’t weigh as much as its older brother the XPS 420, it also doesn’t have a convenient handle for hefting it, and getting it into and out of computer store was a minor epic.

While I waited, I explored every conceivable option, usually in chats with the Claude mobile app: clone the 8700’s hard drive to an SSD and carry on (proved unworkable), upgrade the 8700’s components more thoroughly, upgrade the 420 (if you know much about computers, you are probably laughing right now), build from scratch with no computer experience more advanced than an attempt to replace the coin battery on the 420’s motherboard, buy stock, buy custom.

I eventually decided that I needed to be back on a PC fairly quickly for the early May launch of Pride & Planetoids. And if I was going to be spending new PC prices, I wanted something more or less capable of running locally hosted AIs, which translated to: 32 gb ram, either DDR4 or DDR5, and 16 gb vram on an Nvidia graphics card. After a lot of waffling around, I found a custom PC shop online with good reviews and prices I could live with, albeit with a bit of belt tightening in other areas.

The result was very pink, and about $80-$100 cheaper than roughly the same guts in basic black. And also, I was in an exuberant mood after this happened.

When I fired the new computer up and moved over the important files, I found that HHK0 was at 16000 words. Space & Sensibility was at 1600 words when the old computer went down, but grew to 3000 words with the help of a session I dictated directly to the Claude mobile app while between computers, and then expanded on the new computer. I also made some progress on brainstorming other story ideas in longhand during my computerless period. Meanwhile, all the posts I’d scheduled here on WordPress in March for release in April continued to run.

On the automation front, Claude.ai made the case that since I was already using whisper and python for dictation transcription, I might as well use python+LM Studio for the kinds of automations I’d been running in n8n. So, currently, I am testing a python version of the Summary Plus automation, with the Claude chatbot tweaking the code based on the error messages thrown on each previous pass. Back muscles seem to be doing better, and I am now returning to my usual scheduled chaos.