Hi, everyone! As if four days of power outage weren’t enough disruption, a few days later my main computer gave up the ghost. It’s the motherboard. For anyone that is not techie, this is Bad News. I need a new computer and there’ll be that annoying phase of getting everything working again. In the meantime I’m going to try to keep up with the Riskies (more or less) via the kind offices of the local public library.
Things could be worse, of course. My writing resides on an old laptop that is perfectly functional for word processing but is so old it’s not compatible with what my Information Services Dept (also known as dear husband) would need to do to connect it to the Internet.
It’s not really that primitive. It is annoying to have to go to the weather channel or newspaper rather than get onto weather.com. When I was missing an ingredient in my usual marinade for tuna steaks, I couldn’t go on foodtv.com to find an alternate recipe. I had to wing it. Well, that’s what the Regency folk would have to do. (For weather, I guess they’d ask some elderly curmudgeon of a gardener or countryman how his bones felt.)
The tough thing is the isolation when one is used to going online for email and blogging several times a day. As I am writing this my 1-hour time limit on this computer is ticking away. I’m not used to that! But think about it. Regency ladies might visit daily with local friends and relatives, and I imagine some did, but they also wrote lots and lots of letters.
Enough whining. I am trying to see some blessings in this. This week is the first of the three weeks this summer my kids are at day camps, and so far it’s been a productive one writing-wise. I can’t make excuses to go “look something up” on the Internet or compulsively check email and/or the blog. For a while, I’m free of hearing market news, etc…, that could raise those hideous inner writing demons that make me doubt whether what I’m writing is marketable this instant.
Still, I seem to be an web junkie. Withdrawal has me just a tad jittery. How about you? Anybody else go through web withdrawal? How do you cope?
Elena, hands shaking a bit as she types this post
LADY DEARING’S MASQUERADE
Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice for Best Regency Romance of 2005
http://www.elenagreene.com/
I am TOTALLY addicted to the web. And I will be computer-less starting tomorrow at 10:00am until Sunday, when my son and I go visit my mom.
I’ll be taking a hard copy print-out of my ms., and I have a sneaking suspicion I will get a lot more editing done than if I had the distraction of the internet.
But it will be painful.
Good luck with the m-board, Elena!
Elena,
I go through withdrawal after only a day! I am totally addicted.
You have my deepest sympathies on all fronts. I’ve so been there. I too am a web junkie. My mom was here on Monday so I didn’t check my email and it was killing me. LOL!
You have my deepest sympathy, Elena!
I can hardly remember how I lived before the internet. When my connection is down, I go crazy — I can no longer remember how I used to find the weather predictions, or movie times, or driving directions, or post office hours, or the TV schedule, or news, or a million other things.
Cara
If I’m in a different place I can stand it for a couple of days before I sneak off to the nearest internet cafe or library. But if I’m home without email it’s not pretty.
On the other hand, it should be possible to have a rewarding and productive time, tho I can’t imagine how. Oh, writing? I guess. Of course if it were a totally computerless time and the alphasmart wasn’t juiced up I’d probably be dying to write, but deep inside knowing that I was off the hook.
Janet
Just to add to the chorus–yeah! I am so web-addicted. I keep a mail window open constantly in my office, to immediately see any email that comes in. I’m constantly popping open browsers to see this or that. I download all journal articles off the web–I don’t think I’ve opened an actual paper journal in over a year. And I mostly read them on the screen, nowadays, to avoid printing out reams and reams of paper.
Yikes! Looks like it’s unanimous–you’ve got all our sympathies, Elena!
Todd-whose-hands-are-starting-to-tremble-too
Thanks for all the sympathies! Still progressing the new ‘puter. I hate, hate, hate that period of setting everything back up again.
I know what you’re talking about Janet about being “off the hook” though. Sometimes I do dread the writing–one of the reasons is that I want it to be so good and know that it often isn’t. When one is off the hook one can complain about all the golden prose one could have written had everything cooperated.
But I got over it and had a productive week anyway. 🙂