Technology, How I Hate Thee

If you are an unknown writer like I am, then you shoulder all the burden of the "trappings" of the modern day writer. You cannot sit your cottage in the Cotswold or the Lake District, away from the drudgery of life, penning your fantasies. You struggle with technology, screaming at your keyboard, and Googling how to do the simplest of mundane tasks because, well, technology owns you whether you want it to or not.

I work on a computer day and night. Literally. My day job requires that, aside from feeding my meter so that it forces me to get up from my chair in two-hour increments, I sit at a computer 99% of the time. Given this, my hands are now toast, with marked weakness in my dominant (right) hand. Picking up a pen and writing for any length of time is impossible, so writing longhand on a notepad is a pipe dream. It's a vicious cycle. I've screwed up my hands because I spend so much time on the computer that I can't hold a pen, which would alleviate the stress on my hands from working on a computer. I spend all day on a computer and if I want to write, I have to do it on a computer.

Technology is not natural to me or would, I say, many in my generation. I learn what I have to learn, but I have no intuition about it, and I often have to revisit what I thought I'd mastered two months earlier because it just doesn't stick in my head. That I was able to set up this blog I consider a minor miracle.

Over the years, I have produced books for myself and also for other people okay. I can dabble in Photoshop to a minor degree, which lets me keep my job. I did set up my own website, which doesn't look great, but it's okay, but am now fighting with numerous entities as to why my website is not working, right at the time when I am trying to shop my latest book my website is dead. I have no idea why. I am at the point of pinging the "chat" function of my host and begging for mercy.

And yet this is what you have to do if you don't have the money to pay others to do it for you. Which I don't. There is only so much money you can throw at this writing business before you start to feel guilty about using marital funds. At least I feel guilty. I don't see these as "sunk" costs, but when your last royalty check was $14.23 (no, that isn't a typo), then you try to absorb as much of the "freight" associated with writing as you can. Or at least I am doing that. I am lucky in the sense that my job forced me to learn basic formatting skills, basic Photoshop stuff, basic web design stuff, basic Dreamweaver stuff, etc. A lot of people use WordPress, but I find its limitations frustrating, so I put on my technology hip waders and slop through the Adobe swamp, hoping for success. Apparently, not very successfully, as my current website nightmare attests.

Next week, I will talk about the minimum costs you must absorb as a writer, and where I feel you must dump some $$$ and where you shouldn't if you're operating on a shoestring.