My Writing Week: Issue 4, Year 5.


Hi all,

Communication problems was my theme last week.

Byline Missing From Divine Article

I had a new article posted on Divine last week. The article was about hiding my ulcerative colitis from the world. I failed to notice the article lacked a by-line. Some readers might have thought that I wanted to remain anonymous and still hid my disease. I was notified of the problem the next day and the article is now attributed to me.

I have received a number of comments on the article on the Divine site and on facebook. As a result, if I wrote the article again I would include another reason for not telling the world I had ulcerative colitis: people offering dietary and medical advice. Over the years I have come across lots of natural therapies and dietary changes that supposedly cure ulcerative colitis, none of them have worked.

A big problem with ulcerative colitis is that it comes and goes. So say it is active and I decide to try one of the various “cures”. I choose a cure of standing on one leg while singing I’m too Sexy for my Shirt. After a couple of months of no sign of the disease, I might become convinced my cure has worked. But the disease returns a couple of months later leaving me feeling slightly gullible.   

Typos in The Dervish House

In my last blog post I pointed out three typos I had seen in Ian McDonald’s novel The Dervish House. I then added a comment about a further two typos. I did not point these typos out as a complaint, just an observation. The typos have not influenced my enjoyment of the novel. I finished reading it last night and hope to post a review sometime this week.

Problems with Technology

Karl Marx was convinced chemicals were added to bread to make it go stale faster. Maybe they are. I am convinced that electronic manufacturers start sending bugs over the web to computers and printers two years after the machines are first used. These bugs eventually cause so many problems that a consumer gives up and buys a new machine.

The first two IBM second-hand computers I bought lasted five and seven years respectively. The current Compaq began acting up about a month after its two year warranty ended. I doubled its Ram memory and the computer behaved for about seven months. But now it keeps having start-up problems.

The first printer I bought lasted over seven years. The last two, including the one I destroyed in a fit of rage last week, lasted about two years each before they started acting up.

So Hewlett Packard and Cannon, I am aware of what you are doing.  

My Novel Writing

My printer and discussions about my article and blog post, took up a lot of writing time last week. As a result, I added the least weekly amount of words to my novel since I started writing it at the beginning of November: a paltry 1300 words.

This week has not started any better. My computer decided to have start-up problems this morning. A blue screen said something about a corrupt file. As requested, I did yet another restore, the third in two weeks.

And the cricket starts tomorrow. And it’s My Birthday on Wednesday. And then Australia Day on Thursday. And I have to spray the fruit with malathion on Saturday…

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review of Jonathan Franzen's Purity.

Image
Although this blog is mainly about science fiction, I sometimes read pure literature just to see what the other side is up. Jonathon Franzen is one of my favourite non-genre authors and here is a review of Purity, which I just finished reading.   Purity is literature with a plot. The plot revolves around secrets with the two main secrets being Purity’s search for the identity of her father, and the cover-up of a murder. The novel follows four main characters: Purity, Andreas Wolf, Tom and Leila. Purity is a recent university graduate in search of journalism job. She was raised by a controlling, but loving, mother who always got her own way and would argue for hours about the most trivial matters. Andreas Wolf is modelled on Julian Assange, complete with his own version of Wikileaks. Wolf was raised in East Germany and was a reluctant escapee when the wall came down as East Germany was a seemingly perfect place to keep his secrets. Tom is the owner and editor of an invest...
Read more

Review of The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, by Richard Flanagan

Image
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is about a dying mother, Francie, and the efforts of her adult children to keep her alive, even though she wants to die. The children have lost the ability to communicate with each other, and are out to show they have the power, at least in the case of Anna and Terzo, to keep their mother alive. While Tommy, a failed artist who was looking after Francie, just acquiesces to the will of his other two siblings.  The novel is also about our dying planet, particularly from climate change, as animals go extinct We say we care, but do little to prevent the unfolding disaster. The novel is set in Tasmania while bushfires rage throughout that state and the rest of Australia.  Anna is the main protaganist, a successful architect, who rather than face her mother's pain, her crap relationship with her son, or the raging climate around her, retreats into social media. Frequently forwarding articles she has not read to her friends, showing how she avoids taki...
Read more

New Blog Look.

I have just updated the look of my blog. I am trying to create a consistent web presence online by ensuring that my blog, website and social media look the same and are connected.  This desire for a consistent web presence is a result of what I have learnt in my studies for a Bachelor or Arts (Internet Communications). I have just completed the first two subjects. One of the subjects, Web Communications, had us creating a new web presence, so I created a new blog on Wix, a new Facebook page, a new Twitter account, and joined Wattpad for the first time. As part of the assignment we were supposed to consistently style all the sites. The central node is here . The other subject was an Introduction to Internet Design. In that subject we had to create, from html and CSS code, a website. I choose to do one for author Graham Clements. For that website, I pretended that I had published four novels that are in reality only unpublished, and in need of redrafting, manuscripts. I am quite ...
Read more