My writing week 3 (49)

Hi all,

My Kindle broke. Whaaaaaa. It had been given me trouble all last week. Most days it would work okay for 15 to 20 minutes and then for some reason the search box would just appear at the bottom of the screen. So I pressed “back” to get rid of it, and then it would reappear again and fill up with qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq, like a button was stuck. When I pressed q, jo8b came up. I tried to press “back” faster than the q’s came but to no avail.

The previous page button on the right hand side did not take me to the previous page either, it brought up the search box and filled it with a qjo8b. Ebooks would also automatically flip backwards through their pages. All this made it very hard to read.

I looked up the amazon website and there were suggestions for fixing similar faults of holding the power switch on for 15 seconds to reset the kindle. This I did, and it worked for a little while. But this morning the thing with the search box started as soon as I turned it on. If made it near impossible to navigate. So I sent a message to Amazon and they rang back.

The customer service officer wanted me to download an update to my kindle. This took me about an hour to figure out how to do, even when I sent another message and got them to try and help me. Luck and clicking enough icons eventually prevailed. But after installing the updated Kindle software the problem persisted.

While fiddling with the Kindle as the very gracious amazon customer service officer tried to work out what to do, I discovered that if I pressed j, qo8b would appear, if I pressed o, qj8b would appear and so on. It was like the j q b o keys had been corrupted. I told the guy this. Anyway he got me to reset the Kindle to the factory default. After a long time the Kindle came back on, but the problems persisted.

I could not re-register it because I needed to type in my email address, and when I got to .com, qj8b was entered instead of the o. So the guy is sending out a replacement Kindle. It will cost me postage. Hopefully nothing else. Interestingly when I was trying to connect to wireless after it rebooted, it came up with “Kerrys” wireless connection. I think there is a Kerry who lives over the back fence, but should I be able to detect her wireless connection on my Kindle?

I spent many hours fiddling with the Kindle and a couple of very late nights. Time I wished I could have spent more productively.

Google books opened in the US last week with three million free ebooks. That will put a dent in a lot of publisher’s and authors pockets. When I checked it out, it said that it was not available yet in Australia.

I did finally finish critiquing a very good novel: Datura Highway by Daniel King. He hopes to have it published soon. It’s an intriguing psycho thriller fantasy. I will be buying a copy. Its 60,000 words took me about 12 weeks to critique. So I am not the fastest. I sent him a critique after each chapter.

I finished reading China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station. I found that it took way too long for the story to start. It’s nowhere near as good as The Scar. I will post a review soon.

Thunderstorms again interfered with my writing last week. Wangaratta had floods again. At least I did not have to water the garden much. But again I did very little writing. I did not even get started on my next article for Divine magazine. But I have managed to salvage something from the wreckage of today: I wrote that article. I now just have to edit it a few times.

Graham.