My Writing Week: Issue 8, Year 5

Hi all,

I did not do much writing last week because my computer continued to act up. It taunted me by sometimes working, sometimes not. When I was not fiddling with or shouting at my computer, my writing time was taken up by editing chapter thirty-eight of my novel. I then got 800 words into chapter thirty-nine, with the characters finally landing on the planet. I have now written 78,589 words of my epic. 

So will my epic become a best-seller? British writer and critic Robert McCrum says that writers hoping to write a best-seller “might as well stand in a field during a thunderstorm and hope to be struck by lightning”.

Well, when I was younger I once played golf at Trafalgar golf course during a thunderstorm. Huge power lines hang over the Trafalgar golf course, but I was not struck by lightning. But at that stage I was failing English at school. Years later, when I lived in Sydney and worked in research in education, my flat was hit by lightning and it burnt out half the wiring. So maybe I was getting closer to being struck by best-seller luck. Since then I have completed a Master of Creative Writing, but I have also moved to the less thunderstorm prone Wangaratta.

Critiquing

I just checked and it has taken me three weeks to critique the first 19,130 words of a 144,000 word manuscript. I blame Hewlett Packard.

Machine Man

I’ve just finished reading the very good and funny satire Machine Man by Australian Max Barry. It’s about a mechanical engineer who accidentally losses a leg and replaces it with a mechanical one. He then has this excellent mechanical leg and not so great organic leg…If I have no computer problems I should post a review of the novel soon.

Freelancer.com

I have previously mentioned the rip off that www.freelancer.com.au is. Well the scumbags offering the writing jobs have outdone themselves in recent weeks. A new low has been offered: $1.50 for 500 word original articles. These scumbags should be stapled to the wall of a library and have every single book thrown at them.

My Computer Problems

My barely three-year-old computer is still acting up. But not all the time. It won’t save me much aggravation by simply not working, so I can then just go out and buy a new one, instead it continues to taunt me, like someone wearing a Collingwood football scarf.  

Windows said that Kasperspy was causing a problem. Problem was I had not installed Kasperspy on my computer. But I have had problems with antivirus programs before. So I thought I might have a problem with the AVG anti-virus program I was using. AVG would not uninstall no matter what I tried. I finally found a special program on the AVG site that uninstalls AVG when it refuses to be uninstalled. That worked. But alas my computer still acted up next time I turned it on.

So my useless Compaq computer is on death row: act up tomorrow and I do a recovery (which will take about two days to complete, with all the updates to software that it will need). If the Compaq computer acts up just once after that, I will buy a new computer. Once my new non-Hewlett Packard computer is up and running, I will take the Compaq outside, climb onto the roof and drop the computer onto the driveway.

If you are in Wangaratta in the next few days and hear a triumphant scream coming from the west, you will know I have a new computer.