I love computers. I enjoy playing games and I used to be a software tester, learning new software and then trying to break it, and although technology can be frustrating (and I feel it has made us as a society a bit less polite), the power at our fingertips now is immense. I recall the old days of writing papers for school – sometimes struggling to find the books I needed for a report because someone else had them or they had been mis-shelved, (for example), or struggling to find the information I was looking for to satisfy some random curiosity.
Now the full breadth of the web is at our fingertips. If I can’t find what I want with my first search result, I have pages to browse through – journals, newspapers, videos. I love that; it is incredibly useful to me as a writer, and allows me to look at places I’ve never been to, examine a period in history far in the past, all with incredible ease. I love learning, and far too often I get lost doing research; I spent hours searching for information about the Picts for “Blood and Frost” for example.
So when my computer – my job, my entertainment – started to act up, I limped along as well as I could, not wanting to deal with the expense and stress of changing over to a new machine. The issue finally reached critical mass, and with a bit of a heavy heart I acceded to my SO’s desire to buy me some new gear, and together we brought out an old case and built a new machine, although I feel bad at the cost of it all.
But I love building computers. It’s exciting (and a little scary) to seat a processor, but so satisfying! When it boots for the first time I get a real thrill; clearly I am a geeky girl.
But all this means I am reinstalling all my old programmes and transferring about five year’s worth of data to another machine. Sorting it (needed or not?), and then copying it over is a bit tedious and I’m doing it in safe mode, because of some disk errors I can’t seem to fix. So regrettably, my work on the Void Chronicles has slowed significantly since mid-last week, and I haven’t hit the 60,000 word mark, as I had hoped to last Friday.
My new machine is nice, however, and the RAM (memory) has LEDs on it! I’m a sucker for cool lights and colours.
I’ve copied a fair bit of my data over, (books, research, personal stuff) and am slowly plodding through the installation of programs and setup. My biggest complaint is Firefox; I have literally thousands of bookmarks, and it’s a pain to get that data over (and a bit complicated to explain why).
But I’m making progress, and will be working on “The Void Wept” tomorrow. I am so excited to get it out to everyone, to see what you think! I think you’ll like the lore in it, as well as understanding how Julianna got to Galea. 😉
All the best,
Holly