You may be wondering, I don’t suppose you are really, how my writing is progressing. Well, on a positive note, I am now the proud possessor of a Netbook. This electronic gizmo fits into my handbag so it can be taken anywhere with me, and as long as I have access to WiFi I can pick up the latest version of my novel from Dropbox and off I go. I can use it without WiFi but I might get into a bit of a muddle with versions, and getting muddled is one of my specialities so…
McDonalds was the answer. In McDonalds, I was assured, there is free WiFi, there are also cups of coffee, seating and tables. So, in desperation I took myself to the nearest McDonalds for some uninterrupted writing. I bought a cappuccino and settled myself down to write. It was lunchtime so the place was quite busy but not too busy to stop me signing up for the WiFi.
I headed for Google, thinking that the system would spot that I didn’t have a network connection, search for one and then offer me a choice of networks to select. Of course this didn’t happen so I had to rummage around in the network settings to find the one I needed. Eventually, having filled in the requisite fields, I was logged on. An hour had passed since I walked through the doors. Where did that go?
I started to type but the memory was small on the little machine and Word kept swapping out to save my huge document.
To add to my frustration there was a very friendly cleaner. Undaunted by the fact that my fingers were tip tapping on the keys and I had a frown of concentration on my face she thrust her face towards me ‘Is it work or are you playing a game?’
I jerked my attention to her friendly but un-intuitive visage. ‘I’m writing a book.’ I tried to look fierce but I’m afraid my formatively learned manners prevented me from saying what I really wanted to say, which was, ‘F..k off and stop bothering me.’
Eventually, after a reluctant conversation I was able to explain that I was working to a deadline and ‘… so if you’ll excuse me,’ and she buggered off, looking, I have to say, a little accusing.
I did get a few more words written and now the word count stands at 74,213.
When I got home, a Chicken Legend Meal and a double chocolate cookie later (not good), I spoke to Whizz about the memory thing. Bless him, he introduced me to MdCharm, a text editor that enables one to write a document in unformatted plain text. He spent hours converting my Word document and the result is that the Word file that was 623KB (uncompressed) has been reduced to a .txt file of only 401KB. I will report on how I progress with the book in this new format, the challenge being to annotate the text with little codes to achieve headings, bold and so on.
I’m sure I’ll cope. I am woman!