Electronic Slaves

This post was supposed to be my whiny little story about how my aging Kindle stopped uploading new books and how I had to go into my Amazon account and upload them manually, one at a time. And to punish me, it spontaneously rebooted itself. Twice. But somewhere along the way it morphed into something else.

I got to thinking about electronic devices, and how dependent we’ve become on them – i-Pads, tablets, e-readers, laptops, and the most insidious of all, the cell phone. Almost everyone I know has a cell phone, I’ve even seen little kids with them.

What I really find hard to understand is how attached people are to them. I even had a friend boast to me once that her whole life was on her phone. Really? I use my phone for taking pictures, texting (somewhat reluctantly), and (gasp!) as an actual phone. That’s it. No banking, no aps, no social media, no games.

Occasionally I might check my email, but I’ll fire up the laptop if I want to answer any of it. GPS might be handy, except I have nowhere to go these days. Facebook? Forget it! Those keyboards are teeny tiny and really annoying to use. I find it hard to comprehend how anyone can type actual words using just their thumbs.

People get the Kindle app for their phones so they can read books on those tiny screens. Some watch videos on their phones. I can barely read text messages, I can’t imagine trying to watch a video.

It bothers me that we’ve become so dependent on all these electronic devices. I’m the first one to admit I’d find it hard to live without my laptop. Not impossible, when push comes to shove there’s always pen and paper for writing, but difficult. My Kindle? I’d mourn the loss of all those books, but I have plenty of unread books on my bookshelves.

As for my phone, well, I have a kick-ass camera and a land line. I’m good.

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Wordage Report

New Words:

Driving Into Forever (rewrite) – 4,176
Blog Posts – 935+456+596 +806=2,793
Total = 6,969

The wordage is creeping up, and it isn’t the blog words this week but the Driving Into Forever words.

Editing:

The TraxTime program tells me I spent 5 hours and 28 minutes editing Blood Ties last week. A little less time than the week before, but it was much more productive time.

What I’m Reading:

I still have not cracked open The Jackal, by J.R. Ward. Maybe I’ll use it as my reward book for when I finish editing Blood Ties.

Believe it or not, I only read one tree book last week, Irish Rose, by Nora Roberts. Maybe that’s why I was more productive with the writing and editing.

However, my poor, ailing Kindle got a work-out. I finished the last two books of Shifter Shenanigans - Blue Moon Dragon and Fiona’s Mates - by Shelley Munro and have started Alien Shenanigans, which is also a three-in-one deal.

Goals

Looks like I rocked all my goals last week.

I did a respectable amount of editing on Blood Ties, and I feel like I made actual progress. I powered through that pesky scene that was holding me up, adding a few hundred words in the process. The next chapter (lucky number 13) needs to be pared down, which is always more fun than adding to.

OMG! Where did all these versions of Driving Into Forever come from? There must be eleventy billion of them. And therein lies the reason this novel floundered for so long. I kept changing my mind about whether certain scenes should be included, and what order they should be in.

The section I was working on this week had three different beginnings and five different middles. And none of them transitioned logically from the first two chapters I’d already rewritten. I had to read all these scenes, decide what was important, and then work from there. Yikes!

This Week’s Goals

1. Keep up the good work editing
2. Keep working on Driving Into Forever
3. Limit my reading time.

I did it last week, let’s see if I can manage a repeat.