Life is crazy at times. Juggling life's obligations and trying to write can be sometimes be a mountain of a challenge.
My days always begin after nights of being up and down to manage my daughters needs. She stops breathing at night and her feeding pump has other challenges, I wake to a mountain of chores. She has meds to be administered and a bed that needs to be stripped and cleaned along with her.
This is a physical and daily grind, truthfully, it is all I can do some days. Her day requires more work and this is not a blog about that. This is about my frustration with my tools lately.
When I sit down to write it seems to have become a novelty that my device will work. I don’t get the luxury of writing at a desk or in a quiet moment. I write a lot in those in between spaces. Sometimes I am literally laying across the floor and my daughter is crawling on me.
I wrote my first novel on my original Kindle fire with a blue touch keyboard using open office app. It was a great medium for it. It prevented me from editing and I would email myself the chapters. It was portable. I could fit it in a purse and write anywhere. On a hike, in a cafe without wifi or on the floor in the living room.
The fire at this point is on it’s last leg. I filled the memory and the wifi connection for emailing has become a problem.
So I decided to buy a new tablet that used phone software to write. It became difficult. The apps all require me to be attached to wifi at all times. The autocorrect is extremely aggressive and decided I am actually French. The language is set to English and I have done factory restarts several times. But nope. It takes the words I write and convert them to the word that would be equivalent to that spelling in French. Which is not the English word I am writing. Happens about 3 sentences in.
I was working on editing my novel and realized this would not work so I bought a Chrome book. It worked fine mostly for that but, it too prefers an internet connection.
Last month every time I set down to write it wanted to be online. And or update. Truthfully when I do use the offline feature, it is a gamble if it will save it.
So about a week ago after my 10 several times of frustration I bit the bullet and put an order in for a device that is essentially an electronic typewriter. The only way for data to go in will be through my fingers on a keyboard. And it will be able to save up to the cloud and take the text to my computer. It will work offline and looks portable. Even uses digital ink so the screen fatigue will be less.
I am excited and trying to not beat myself up over the cost. I remind myself this is the career I am pursuing and I need tools that won’t let me down. But it is amusing that I need to pay more to do less so I can get the work done.
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