As a start, I don't know who is reading this so I've put in as little swearing as I can and if there is any it is pretty mild. I'm always being thoughtful. But I could put in a big swear right here for a joke but I'll deny myself the cheap laugh. So let me get the muffin of a topic 'technology' out of the way.
Technology is a fool. It is the court jester prancing around thinking itself to be the icing on what is frankly a disgustingly vile and horribly foul cake which causes immediate obesity.
Technology to be fair is great but causes to me, great stress. Yes it may have given us firstly sound then picture then colour and now HD which is brilliant for things like travel documentaries, but the technology that leaves a turd on my front step is the computer.
How we originally had a black screen and green text which probably gave people illness from just looking at it and the thumping clack of the keyboard. Which back then people thought was the future. How weird must "Space: 1999" look today? I hate, absolutely hate, the useless, crappy, showy-off paper clip that says "You've made an error you pillock. How about this instead which any sensible person would've done anyway." Then it prats about and shows off by morphing into a bike or a book like it were Ditto from Pokemon (or for the older generation, Morph, from 'Morph'). It starts giving me examples.
How about: "John did not enjoy his parsnips." Despite the fact I never even typed the word "parsnips" or indeed any other vegetable, it seems to be taking Mick and the biscuits with it. And not just a plain digestive but the chocolate ones form the Fox's Selection. It's trying to run my life. No paper clip is ever going to brainwash me.
So I had what has to be one of the most annoying things to happen from a computer. Well I blame the computer, the real culprit was my memory stick. Whilst I am writing a novel and have been for the past 4 years, I keep my writing on two memory sticks and two computers, yet I have one memory stick where I tend to write my new material and then later paste it into the other devices to update them. However I hadn't done this for the past week out of sheer laziness and while it is my fault I didn't expect this to happen...
On one day not too long ago, I prepared to write after a whole morning of kidding myself in scribbling useless notes I was never going to use. Eventually sat at my computer, I inserted the memory stick into the laptop and it loaded. The computer recognised the memory stick as memory F but the files didn't pop up. "How peculiar," I thought. I went to the My Computer option and while the computer showed the memory F was indeed there, I clicked on the memory F icon, a massive red cross said "THE MEMORY YOU ARE SEARCHING IS UNOBTAINABLE. PLEASE INSERT FILE F," even though the icon for file F has showed up telling me that the computer has recognised that the memory stick was plugged in. Trying every other memory stick slot on the laptop, I tried my other computer and my friends and so on but still it wouldn't load the files. "Curses," I bellowed. I bellowed a lot of curses. Thankfully I hadn't lost everything but still five pages of writing to which I could vaguely remember. I had to do a swift re-write only without the writing there. In the end the newer text was to me, better than the previous.
But once (if) the novel is finished I'll have to re-write and re-draft the whole thing. I love writing the story but the idea of re-writes and re-writes and re-writes to me is as exciting as seeing a large man in a vest in a scruffy, darkened flat eating soggy, watery cornflakes under a dim lit light bulb swinging from a wire on the ceiling.
While I realise it is my fault for not updating my other saving devices, the memory stick shouldn't have just died. Every time I switch my computer on I try the old memory stick hoping for a miracle. Try resuscitating a moth. That is how difficult and pointless it was (apologies if you like moths)
But from the whole situation I learned that to be a successful writer, which I am still trying to be, is that it is the re-writes that are one of the keys to a good script and a sharp story. Re-writing gives you the opportunity to perfect lines and introduce new ones.
On the plus side of technology however, cameras can take very nice pictures and we can record home videos for family nostalgia. And we can watch TV shows when we want now which is nice. That's all I can think for pros at the moment.
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