When technology fails... and when it doesn't.

Six days ago, we moved house. Three days ago, we were meant to have internet installed but no one turned up. I kept meaning to arrange someone else to cover this blog, but I never got round to it, so here I am, typing this, hoping to get it online via the one bar of 4G signal on my phone. (The computer isn’t set up yet either. My desk is in pieces on the floor of the new office, waiting for an adjustment so it can fit beneath the built-in bookshelves.)

There are times when technology is wonderful and times when it isn’t. Anyone who’s self published, designed their own author website, or done anything at all involving Microsoft Word, can surely attest to that. 

Yet, I’ve discovered you can do rather a lot on a phone with one bar of signal when you have to. 

Tesco shops. Address changes. School applications (those require a bit of running around outside waving your phone in the air). Bus journeys to one new school have turned into opportunities to make use of some extra bars, catching up on admin and phoning all those companies who tell you to visit their website when their website tells you you’d better call. 

Image by Claudio Bianchi at pixabay.com

I have also used my phone in the past for noting down quick writing ideas. Not in the last few weeks (my brain had been otherwise occupied) but before that. Those times I wake in the middle of the night and can’t return to sleep because my characters keep having conversations in my head – when turning on a light and finding a notebook would disturb my husband – the notes app on my phone, huddled under a cover, does the job nicely. 

Recently, I’ve extended this to dictation. I used to have to stop washing up, swiftly drying my hands to jot down ideas in a notebook before the characters wander off somewhere else in the imaginary land I’ve created. Invariably, I’d forget to go back to the washing up. Ah – no longer. Now I can continue the conversation, dictating to my phone which cordially types it out for me, granted with plentiful spelling mistakes and amusing interpretations of character names which have to be edited later. Still, the jist of it goes into that note, “Book Title future scenes.” 

I have several of these notes now, for the different projects I’m working on. I know many writers will use Scrivener or something fancy like that, but this simple method works for me right now; it keeps one more juggling ball skybound that could so easily land at my feet and get squashed. So, I'm grateful to God for that.

Hopefully this blog will somehow make it onto t’internet tomorrow. If it does, I’d love to hear your technology difficulties and triumphs. What works, and doesn’t work, for you? Perhaps we can inspire each other for moments like these, when life throws you extra balls.  

Natasha Woodcraft lives with her husband, 4 sons, a spotty dog, a cantankerous bunny and some much maligned fish. She believes stories have power to communicate deep truth and transform lives. Her published novels, The Wanderer Scorned & The Wanderer Reborn, explore God’s redemptive purposes for messy people by reimagining the tale of Cain & Abel. Also a songwriter, Natasha peppers her emotional prose with poetry and song.