Technophobia!

Everything happens at once – just as I’m trying to make some serious headway with my novel (Midsummer Night, is the provisional title), a reminder comes that I need to edit the text of A Blackbird in Amber Twilight ready for publication (by Immanion Press) in the autumn. In theory, I can manage this by allocating my time better, so that when I’m feeling alert (it happens occasionally) I can write new stuff and when the creative energy runs out, I can edit instead. Easy! However, you can guarantee that this master plan will be disrupted, most likely by the heavy THUD of the Elfland manuscript arriving from Tor for copy editing. Oh, and then there’s the matter of the third Blackbird book I’m meant to be writing. It’s good to be busy but there is a limit!

It's a beautiful day, and the garden is full of birds. Talking of blackbirds, I should explain about Mr Criss-Cross. Every blackbird apparently has its own signature tune, a sort of jingle that it repeats while singing as if to identify itself. For example, our much-missed Blackie used to preface his song with car alarm noises, and his predecessor used to sing up and down two notes, ‘Da-doo-da-doo, da-doo-da-doo.’ The dominant male now residing in our garden has a favourite refrain which goes, ‘Oo-ee toot-ta-toot WHEE-WHAY!’ The final ‘whee-whay’ reminds me of someone drawing a flourishing letter X in the air… so I call him Mr Criss-Cross. H’m, that sounds barking mad, doesn’t it? Maybe I’m spending too much time alone in my study…

As for technophobia, this morning I dragged myself out of the stone age at long last by applying to upgrade from dial-up to broadband. I’m terrified! To my mind, all new technology is bound to go Horribly Wrong. The cables won’t be long enough. The software will crash my PC. The connection won’t work. I’ll waste endless hours on the helpline from hell. And so on. This is what’s known in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy as ‘catastrophising’. I believe I learned this unhelpful habit from my mum, who can read the *end of civilisation as we know it* into the most benign situation... So armed with that self-knowledge, I’ll try to stop imagining the worst and instead look forward eagerly to my ‘easy install’ pack. Wish me luck! I’ll post how I get on… if I still have an internet connection, ha ha.

Those inverted commas around ‘easy install’ weren’t meant to seem sarcastic, but I think they did, a bit…