Tag Archive for: Linda Rodriguez

Something Different in a New Book

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez

I don’t do many promotional posts, so I
hope you’ll bear with this one. I have a new book coming November
30th, something different from my poetry or novels. For many years,
I’ve taught writing workshops and classes in person and online. A
number of people across the nation have asked that I write books on
the topics of my classes because they don’t live close enough to take
one and are not in the national organization for which I teach my
online classes (to members only). Next month, my first writing book,
Plotting the Character-Driven Novel, will be published by
Scapegoat Press, and it’s available for pre-orders now (though I
notice only the trade paperback is up right now—it will be available in ebook, as well).

I’m excited by this new type of book
baby. We are planning a whole series of these writing books—next
year one on revising the novel. It’s been a very different process
from writing either poetry or fiction. Here’s the lovely write-up the
publisher has done for the book.

In Plotting the Character-Driven
Novel, Linda Rodriguez turns her sought-after writing course on
using depth of character as a springboard to a strong plot into a
book designed to help the aspiring writer who wants to tell a story
made compelling by the truth and complexity of its characters. She
provides examples of actual documents she has used in creating her
own award-winning books to demonstrate the methods she teaches.

Great plot springs from character and
the motivations each character has for taking or not taking action.
How do you use character as the
springboard to a strong plot that draws its complexity from the
motivations of its characters?

What are the hidden fears and desires
of each major character, what happens when these are frustrated, and
how do they intersect and confl ict with one another?

What are the secrets this character is
hiding even from him/herself? What will this character tell you about
her/himself if given the chance?

Through asking these kinds of questions
of your characters, you will learn to create an exciting and
complex plot, building from the
integrity of the characters you create.

Praise for Linda
Rodriguez’s novels

“Cherokee heritage and the often very
painful legacy of secrets have long been hallmarks of this excellent
series. They are present in great detail here in this complex and
multilayered novel.” —Kevin R. Tipple

“This suspenseful and sensitive tale
of small town secrets is captivating from page one. An absolute
page-turner!” —Hank Phillippi Ryan, Agatha, Anthony and Mary
Higgins Clark award-winning author

“Engrossing” —Library Journal
“Her latest not only fulfi lls its predecessor’s promise but
also furthers Skeet’s story in ways that will have readers eager
for her next case.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch

“Rodriguez’s energetic storytelling
and attention to character prove she is an author who should have a
bright future.” —Oline H. Cogdill, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

“Fans of Nevada Barr and Sara
Paretsky will relish Linda Rodriguez’s stellar debut. Her sleuth,
Skeet Bannion, is a keeper.” —Julia Spencer-Fleming, New York
Times bestselling author of One Was a Soldier


Praise for Linda’s
“Plotting the Character-Driven Novel” Workshop

“Thank you for a wonderful class that
was perfect. The lessons were invaluable.” –Nancy R.

“I learned so much and have some
great new tools for plotting.” –Holly T.

“I now have an arsenal of tools to
tackle that MS.” –Susan B.

“The exercises you gave us provided
me with lots of tools to help with plot and character.” –Nancy E.

“Your exercises really helped! I had
thought I knew my main character pretty well before, but now I know
her so much better. It’s no longer so daunting a task to work on
the book!” –Betty P.

“You have given me so much to help me
write this first book.” – Mary B.

“Your workshop was very inspirational
and helpful. Now, if you could just show up at my house every morning
and make me sit down to write, that would be great!” –Cheryl J.
LINDA RODRIGUEZ’s first novel, Every
Last Secret, won the St. Martin’s/ Malice Domestic Best First
Traditional Mystery Novel Competition. Her novel, Every Broken
Trust, was a Las Comadres National Latino Book Club selection,
took 2nd place in the International Latino Book Awards, and was a
finalist for the Premio Aztlán Literary Award. Her third novel,
Every Hidden Fear, was a Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, a
selection of Las Comadres National Latino Book Club, and received a
2014 ArtsKC Fund Inspiration Award. Her fourth Skeet Bannion novel,
Every Family Doubt, will be published in June 2017. Visit her
Web site at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com

Getting It Together

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
This is not really my house (thank heavens).
My husband, the world’s original
disorganized, absent-minded professor, is fond of saying, “I’m
going to get it together,” as if he’s putting the final touches on a perfectly organized life. Now, regular readers of this blog may
remember that my youngest son, who adores him, calls him “the chaos
demon.” Sometimes people who work with my husband at the university
take someone new into his office just for the shock effect. Over the
years—after many efforts to set up systems he can’t destroy and
after giving him books designed to help him understand the simplest
organizational principles (like ”throw the trash in the
trashcan—don’t just walk past it and deposit it on the kitchen
counter”) I’ve stopped trying. I try to keep a couple of areas
clear and comfortable for me, and I don’t look when I pass the
rest. I haven’t had guests to my house in years, although I had
many before he fully embedded himself in my home. (It takes a year or
two to completely undo good systems, I’ve found, even for a chaos
demon.) He’s a wonderful man, and it’s his only real fault, so I
long ago decided to live with it.

Lately, I’ve been chafing at these
circumstances, however. Probably because, unlike my husband, I work
at home and thus spend most of twenty-four hours a day in these
chaotic surroundings. I’ve grown tired of living with boxes of books
and postal bins of manuscripts stacked in the living room—he runs a
micro press from our home in his spare time when he’s not running a
university press and teaching. This morning finally sealed the deal
for me, however. My weak and shaky hands (from lupus) managed to
knock off the table between our chairs the big Columbia University
cup in which I keep things I use regularly—fountain pens,
mechanical pencils, scissors, a nail file, and knitting needles. This
meant I had to scrabble around on the floor around and under his
chair for the spilled contents of my cup.

He keeps a quilt made by my sister in
his chair to cover up with if he’s cold or just sit on if it’s hot.
This quilt often puddles on the floor around his chair, and I’ve
given up chiding him about it. So this morning, I was looking for my
fallen necessities, only to find that his quilt was hiding three
times as many items as I had spilled. Apparently, I’m not the only
one with shaky hands in this house.

My cup is back and filled with the
pens, pencils, and knitting needles that I consider necessary to
daily life, but my hard-won peace with the house mess is gone. I’m
googling home organization websites and making lists of decluttering
tasks to do over the next weeks. I’m laying in supplies of trash bags
and cardboard boxes. The chaos demon’s days are numbered.

He tells me he is going to get it all
together. I tell him that’s a meaningless phrase, that no one ever
gets it all together. He reassures me that. He. Will. Get. It. All.
Together. I tell him that, like too many men, he sees the house
situation as a war where he can win a battle and go home forever. I
tell him that life’s not like that. “It’s a case of constant
maintenance, baby,” I say. The chaos demon is stubborn, however,
and insists that he will get it together. Tomorrow. Or maybe the day
after that. After all, things are crazy right now. But he will get it
together. Later.

Bouchercon

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
Right now, I’m at Bouchercon in New
Orleans, so this will be a short photo-heavy blog.

My Bouchercon began with the SinC Into
Great Writing, “Doing Diversity Right,” afternoon after great
drama in traveling there with lots of “will I make it in time”
suspense. But my wonderful road-warrior husband dropped me off at the
entrance to the Bouchercon hotel only a few minutes after the
afternoon had begun, and I rushed up to the 41st floor to
find a breathless seat.


The great and impeccable Walter Mosely
gave the keynote speech, followed by a great Q&A session. Then,
we had four workshops on various aspects of diversity—characters,
plot, dialogue, and cultural background. I taught the cultural
background workshop, along with Greg Herren, Cindy Brown, Frankie Y.
Bailey, who taught characters, plot, and dialogue respectively.


These were excellent workshops, each
offering a different take on writing diversely with a heaping helping
of the instructors’ unique personalities shining through. At the end
of the afternoon, we held a big panel to answer the audience’s
questions with Greg, Cindy, Frankie, and me, plus Terri Bischoff,
acquiring editor for Midnight Ink, giving a view from the publishing
side.

An hour wasn’t enough time for all the
questions, but all of the panelists told audience members they’d make
themselves available for further questions throughout the conference.
If my own experience is anything to go by, those in the audience are
certainly taking advantage of that offer.

Hot, Hot Summer

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
It’s the first of September, but it still feels like August, and that’s gone on so long that my eyes are permanently raw from sun and heat and truly excessive humidity. This photo is me at sixteen in my senior play, Li’l Abner, playing Moonbeam McSwine, a sultry woman whose way of dealing with the heat of summer was just to give in to it–and to every man who came along. So it seemed like a good choice for this post all about summer heat and how it makes us feel lazy and… decadent.

Here’s a poem I wrote about summer heat and how it can turn good girls (and women) bad–at least in their minds and imaginations.


BLAME IT ON SUMMER

that I smile too widely,
grinning really, and
laugh
too loud and often; that
I walk
with spring and sensual
sway;
that I stretch myself and
twist
like a cat
baking in the backyard
brightness; that my brain
is sun-bleached,
all rule and thought
boiled away, leaving
only sensory steam;
that my feverish eyes see
strange dancing
flames in afternoon
shadows
along the sides of
streets and Bedouin oases, fragrant
with dates and goats and
acrid desert waters,
in every suburban garden
we pass
while you argue and drive
and I stare,
heavy-brained with heat
and too aware of my own
body
and every other;
that I take a lover,
brazenly, crazily,
too sun-stupid to be
careful,
in my dreams.
Published in Heart’s Migration (Tia Chucha Press, 2009)

Clicking Our Heels – Our Summer Reading and What We Read Again and Again

/in /by
The Stiletto
Gang are all writers, but we also enjoy a good read. In fact, we have
summer reads and books we simply enjoy reading again and again. We thought you
might be interested in both our summer and comfort reading.
Marilyn Meredith: I love to read
anything by William Kent Krueger any time of the year – but there are so many
others, especially female mystery authors. I’ve read Gone With the Wind several times – though I must admit I skipped
over some of the parts about the Civil War. At my age, I can reread about
anything and it seems new.
Paffi Flood: Stephen King. It’s great
to read horror stories late into the night, because the sun is out J.
I was amazed how timeless Salem’s Lot
by Stephen King was. Although it was originally released in 1975, when I
re-read it in 2014, the cadence, the language seemed so contemporary. Of
course, there were the references to 8-track tapes and car carburetors, and
some things from the ‘70s.
Jennae M. Phillippe: I find favorites
so hard to pick! I have more reading time in summer and usually catch up on the
recommendations my friends have sent me over the year. Recent ones that stand
out are Gail Carriger (Steampunk fantasy action romance), Anne Mendel (humorous
post-apocalyptic), and James S.A. Corey (Science fiction). If you have
recommendations, send them my way! I love to revisit my old favorites,
particularly the ones from my childhood, like the entire The Song of the Lioness series from Tamora Pierce, or the Anne of Green Gables books from L.M.
Montgomery. There is something about reading books from your childhood that
makes you feel like a kid again.
Dru Ann Love: I don’t have seasonal
authors. I read all year round and whoever I’m reading at the time becomes a
favorite, especially if their book is part of a series. Naked in Death by J.D. Robb is the only book that I have re-read
multiple times and each time I discover something I missed the first go-round
and fall in love with Eve and Roark all over again.
Sparkle Abbey: Some of our favorite
summer reads are Laura Levine, Carolyn Hart, and when we’re looking for
something a little darker, Lisa Gardner. We’ve both re-read Laura Levine books
occasionally simply because they’re such great escapes. And sometimes you need
to escape! LOL.
Linda Rodriguez: I re-read many books. I’ve
read Shakespeare, the King James Bible,
most of Dickens, Austen, Trollope, and Virginia Woolf many times. I re-read
many favorite poets again and again. I’ve re-read everything Agatha Christie
and Dorothy Sayers (at least, her mysteries) so many times I couldn’t begin to
count.
Bethany Maines: I usually try and read
something fluffy in the summer. I’ll re-read a Terry Pratchett (British humor)
or pick up an L.J. Wilson (sexy romance). The
Blue Castle by LM Montgomery – I loved it as a teenager and even more as an
adult. The idea of casting aside inhibitions to pursue the life you want is a
message that is always good to hear.
Juliana Aragon Fatula: Manuel Ramos,
Mario Acevado, and High Times Marijuana
for Everybody by Elise McDonough, Denise Chavez. The first time I read Indian Killer by Sherman Alexie, I tore
through it with vigor because I wanted to know who did it. The second time I
went through, took notes, marked pages to review, and savored the writing. It
was once for pleasure and twice for writing style. I re-read it because I
switched genres from poetry to mystery.
Kay Kendall: There is no seasonal
difference in my reading habits. For me it is mysteries, every day, all the
time. Or whatever the broadest term is that includes suspense, spy novels, and
the occasional thriller. I am not fond of police procedurals or books featuring
serial killers. Jane Eyre by
Charlotte Bronte. It has everything. Historic sweep, feisty heroine, suspense,
a touch of Gothic horror, and Mr. Rochester. Each time I have reread Jane Eyre, I marvel at its depth. It
holds up very well. I first read it as a young teen so of course I understand
some of its underpinnings better now.

Debra H. Goldstein: Summers are meant
for catching up on light mysteries, biographies, and literature. This summer’s
books ranged from The Nightingale to
Sisters in Law (Ruth Bader Ginsburg
and Sandra Day O’Connor) to the new Harry
Potter. I’m not a big re-reader but there are a few I often refer to for
style or concept like Edna Ferber’s
Giant, Agatha Christie’s books, or anything I think might incorporate a
style or an idea I’m thinking about.

Doing the Right Thing

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez


Sisters
in Crime recently published this important document, Report for
Change: The 2016 SinC Publishing Summit Report on Diversity, Equity,
and Inclusion in the Mystery Community, that I was privileged to
be a part of.


I
have been so proud of SinC for this work that they initiated
themselves without us “diversity” folks having to scream
and beat our heads against the wall. And they’re immediately putting
it into action. See this year’s SinC into Great Writing workshop at
Bouchercon–all about writing authentically about a diverse world and
people (details at the end of this post).

Most
of my adult life, I have been one of the few outliers in
predominantly white (and often also predominantly male) institutions
and organizations–I was the director of a university women’s center
for decades. I have usually had to be the only voice for diversity at
the table, reminding of other cultures and needs, often to
patronizing remarks of “There’s our Linda with her diversity
again.” As a writer who came to the mystery field through poetry
and literary prose, I was and still am active in AWP, where I have
chaired the Indigenous Caucus and am a member of the Latino Caucus
and the Disability Caucus and where our fight for any kind of
representation or access is often bitter and too often denied.

In
the mystery field, although it’s almost entirely white, I found the
writers and their organizations welcoming and truly open and
encouraging to the “Other.” Publishing is, of course,
another matter.

I
can’t tell you how delighted I was when the board of SinC came to me
and said, “We want to do this study. Will you be one of the
people who helps us–and helps us find others and resources about
this, as well?” To my knowledge, none of the few of us “diverse”
folks in SinC were beating this drum or taking them to task. And now,
they’re actually beginning to implement their own recommendations
from the study. I’m so thrilled to see this happen.

I
would hope that everyone who writes, reads, or publishes crime
fiction would read The Report for Change and take its
recommendations and suggested first steps to heart. At the end of the
document is a list of good specific steps that we as crime fiction
publishing, Sisters in Crime national, local SinC chapters, and
individual writers and readers can take to make a real difference in
this important regard.

Now,
for that first important step that SinC is taking. If you’re planning
on attending Bouchercon in NOLA 9/15-18, come a day earlier (Wed.,
9/14) and attend SinC Into Great Writing, “Writing Our
Differences–Doing Diversity Right,” where the fantastic Walter
Mosley will keynote and workshops dealing with creating authentic
diversity in dialogue, character, plotting, and setting will be
taught by Frankie Bailey, Greg Herren, Cindy
Brown,
and me. At the end of the afternoon, all five of us will gather in a
panel with other diverse writers for a freewheeling, wide-ranging Q&A
session.


This
is a great opportunity, and I’m so grateful to Sisters in Crime for
offering it and for doing the work of The
Report for Change,
to which this workshop is a first response. So come join in! As
always, SinC makes this easily affordable–and if you’re a college
student, there are reduced fees.

Too Hot

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez

The temps were 102°
today with a heat index of 110°.
I spent the day as I have this entire week, working in a local Panera
all day, even though I have a nice big office with spacious desk and
comfortable desk chair.

Our
big old house, like a lot of older homes, does not have central air
conditioning, and when the temperatures outside hit the high 90s and
triple digits, those poor window air conditioners just can’t keep up.
So I decamp for the nearest Panera. This happens every summer in
Kansas City, where weeks of triple digits aren’t unheard of and where
humidity is incredibly high. (I once visited San Antonio during one
of these times while San Antonio itself had temps of 103, but found
San Antonio much more bearable because the air was so much drier.)

The
manager and staff at my coffee shop know me and ask how the latest
book is coming along. I also head there when I have copy edits or
page proofs, in order to stay focused, so they see me at times other
than just the hottest days of summer. I hear them explain to new
employees–”She’s a writer, and sometimes she comes here to work
all day.”

The
first day or two that I head out to the coffee shop, if I’m writing
new work rather than dealing with copy edits or page proofs, is
always slower and harder. I have a rhythm established at home where I
usually work, and that rhythm gets thrown off by switching locations.
I’ve been working away from home all miserably hot week long. The
first couple of days were awkward and disappointing, but by today, I
was cruising along at the laptop, fingers flying.

I’m
nearing the end of a book I’ve finished and revised completely, only
to realize that I needed at least two more chapters at the end. Those
chapters are what I’m writing now, and I’m pleased to say they’re
coming right along after an initial loss of momentum when I had to
change location of my daily work. I’m at that stage where I greet my
husband when he shows up at the end of the day with excited babble.
“It’s going so well now!” “ Yay! 4,000 words today.” “I’m
getting really excited about this as I close in on the end. I think
it’s turning out great!”

I’ve
moved into that end-of-book momentum where it becomes almost
impossible not to write and where my brain stays awake into the
night, running through various scenarios and possible alternatives to
planned scenes. This is one of my favorite times in writing a book.

So,
yeah, it’s miserable outside, but I’m in all day where the air is
cold, the music is classical, and the coffee is hot. Sometimes you
just have to move to a different space to write.

Who’s Really Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
Virginia Woolf has a reputation for
difficulty that she doesn’t deserve. It came about because she was a
pioneer of stream-of-consciousness technique in the novel to give the
reader the sense of being inside a character’s mind. She and James
Joyce were contemporaneous with this experiment with Dorothy
Richardson slightly ahead of both of them, although Richardson is
little known today. Because Joyce is deliberately obscure and his
work is larded with all kinds of academic tags, as if to show off how
well he was educated by those Jesuits, people assume that Woolf’s is
also virtually impenetrable. And of course, she had bouts of
madness—and then killed herself—so she must have the most
inscrutable, inexplicable books. People are wrong, however.

Virginia Woolf is not only a great
novelist. All of her novels are completely readable still without a
professor at your side to gloss every other word or phrase, and some
of them are great fun. (Try Night and Day, her delightful
version of a Shakespearean love comedy set in the Georgian era, or
Flush, the story of
Elizabeth Barret Browning’s dog from his point of view, or Orlando,
the wild, funny adventures of a character who changes from woman to
man and back through the ages.) She was one of the great writers of
nonfiction. Many are not aware that she actually made her living for
many years writing reviews, critical essays, and articles for the
Times Literary Supplement and many other newspapers and
magazines in England and the United States. Her nonfiction is some of
the most lucid yet lyrical you’ll find anywhere. Her journals are
another literary treasure. In these, she explored writing in all its
glories and horrors, madness and other mental and emotional states,
described the scenery around her—whether countryside or London—and
wrote with anger, love, and humor of the many talented, bohemian,
and/or famous people she knew and met. They are must reading for any
writer. And finally, her letters are the most fun in the world to
read. Virginia knew what snark was before the word (in its current
usage) was invented. And she didn’t spare herself with her witty
tongue.

I keep using that word fun which
I imagine you never thought you’d hear applied to Virginia Woolf, but
she’s not the tragic figure so many think her. True, she had bouts of
madness throughout her life, and in part because she’d been molested
as a child by an older stepbrother, she avoided sex and never had
children. Yet she had a truly happy marriage to one of the leading
intellectual lights of the day, Leonard Woolf, who adored her and was
devoted to her, impoverishing himself at times to take care of her
when the insanity descended. In fact, it was that loving bond between
her and her long-time husband that led to her suicide. She felt the
madness coming back and couldn’t bear to put him through that ordeal
one more time. Also, she was a social butterfly. She loved people,
and they loved her in return, even when they might get feelings hurt
over a bit of snark directed their way. She would always be upset
that she had hurt anyone and apologize, explaining that it didn’t
mean she didn’t love them but was just the writer’s eye noticing
little eccentricities and commenting on them—and the people she
knew were loaded with eccentricities and bizarre oddities, as well.
Virginia was basically a happy person when healthy.

So I’d like to suggest that you pick up
one of her books or volumes of letters or journals at the library. If
you’re afraid to try her fiction, you might try A Room of Her Own
(a phrase that Virginia gave to modern feminists), in which she
speaks of women artists, particularly women writers, and the way the
patriarchal world of the early 20th century was set
against their development and success. It’s very short and
compelling, including a passage about Shakespeare’s anonymous sister
who was even more gifted and went mad and died at a deserted
crossroads. (This is a masterful tiny work of fiction, and ever since
reading it that sister of the Bard’s has always been real to me.) If
you want one of her novels that was not experimental, try Night
and Day. If you want to try an experimental novel, you might
start with To the Lighthouse, one of her early masterpieces
and extremely readable. Or pick up a volume of her letters or
journals for terrific humor and a look into the creative process of a great
writer.

Whatever Happened to My Scroll and Quill Pen?

/in /by
by Linda Rodriguez
When I was miserably sick just
recently, I started re-reading Virginia Woolf’s letters for comfort
and delight. (No, I’m not afraid of Virginia Woolf, nor should you
be. The title of that play by Albee was a terrible canard. She’s one
of the most readable writers ever and a fabulous role model for women
writers, but that’s another blog post.) Virginia (we’ve long since
become BFFs, even though she died before I was born) is a gossipy,
humorous correspondent and makes great fun of herself (along with
others, usually famous), so there’s a lot in her letters about her
sloppy writing and the blotches caused by the nib of whatever dip or
fountain pen she was using that day or about how lazy and awful she
was for typing a personal letter. She also gets a lot of laughs out
of describing her mishaps while printing (in the day when each letter
had to be set individually by hand and a sudden bump could knock the
whole tray of type to the floor entailing picking up and sorting all
those tiny t’s and i’s). I’ve been having so much fun with her
letters that I’ve continued dipping into them just before bed after
long, long work days. (I completely read and ranked over 40 poetry
book manuscripts in five days to finish up several postal bins I’ve
been working on for a contest and meet a deadline.)

As luck would have it, my laptop
started showing some possibly ominous symptoms of decline. Now,
long-time readers of this blog will remember the hell I went through
some years ago when my dog broke my laptop’s hard drive, and I
discovered my husband had “borrowed” my jump drive and lost it,
as well as the external hard drive we’d used to back up the computer.
(To be fair, he did eventually find the big external hard drive
months after the emergency was over.) Then the brand-new laptop
bought to replace it crapped out on me within two months, so I had to
wait for the company to try repairs and then give up and send me a
new laptop. Consequently, I was not inclined to wait around until my
laptop gave up the ghost (even though I had everything backed up
twice to external drives and to the cybernetic cloud, as well), and
since a good laptop deal had just shown up in my inbox from the
company that made my other laptops—reader, I bought it.

What this has meant, however, is that
I’ve had to set up a new computer and transfer everything I want from
the old one, all while feverishly working to meet multiple deadlines
(the poetry contest was only one). Almost always, one of my two sons
has done this for me in the past. The oldest has his own very
successful computer consulting business with major university clients
around the country. (Why didn’t I go into engineering and computers
when I was young? Oh, yeah, the first PCs didn’t show up until that
oldest son was already in school.) The youngest one is an academic,
but a tech-meister, even if his Ph.D. is in medieval English lit. The
oldest was out of town, working at Stanford, and the youngest has
just been made dean at his university and is embroiled in the budget
for the humanities division and can’t really spare the time since
he’s facing a tight deadline, as well.

So here I am, trying to uninstall all
the memory-hog programs I don’t want that came with Windows 10 (I am
emphatically not a game person so why won’t you let me take
Xbox off my laptop?), so I can install the things that I want, like
Scrivener, Evernote, Dropbox, my daily planner. Here I am trying to
find and download the right driver for my laser printer, which is a few years old
but reliable. (What do you mean, you don’t make that model’s driver
available any longer?) Here I am, trying to create the recovery media
you told me to make, Microsoft—without telling me I would need a
16G flash drive that was empty and couldn’t be used for anything
else, even if it had extra capacity, until I got into the middle of
the process that I had to go to a website to find. (I mean, honestly,
the geeks who designed all this might have tons of empty 16G flash
drives lying around, but I’ve only got two little 2G ones for taking
files to be printed at Kinko’s or something, one empty 8G and one
almost-full 8G that I use for quick back-ups of things I’m working
on, one 64G flash drive that’s my permanent back-up flash, and one
half-full 90G external hard drive for ultimate back-up, and I suspect
the average non-paranoid-of-hard-drive-failure person doesn’t have
nearly that many!)

And I still haven’t really begun
transferring files, of which I have many, many, many. I’m a writer,
remember? That’s what I do—write.

I’ve suddenly become nostalgic for the
splotchy dip pen and crotchety hand-set type of Virginia’s day. I
mean, Shakespeare never had a computer—or flash drive or printer
driver or software package—and no one’s really outdone him yet,
have they? I think the secret must be the scroll and quill pen.
That’s what I want!

(And no, I wouldn’t really give up my
new little, featherweight, PURPLE laptop with the 10-hour battery for
anything. I even wrote and posted this blog on it.)

Clicking Our Heels – What We Hate Most About Computers

/in /by

Clicking Our Heels –
What We Hate Most About Computers

I’ve had that kind
of day! (Debra speaking) My computer
ate my words written for the day before deciding frozen was the position it
would like to be in. Even though I normally love computers, today, I asked my
fellow Stiletto Gang members “What they
hate most about computers?” Here’s what they said:
Dru Ann Love: The
updates and how it messes with my settings.
Bethany Maines:
The thing I hate most about computers is that I can’t punch them. I want to
start a business selling nerf computer replicas that come with their own
baseball bat.
Juliana Aragon Fatula:
They aren’t faithful. I have a relationship with a new computer on average
about once a year and they are unfaithful and I have to move on and go with a
younger, newer model. Sometimes I hate the fact that they make me want to pick
them p and throw them out the window or at the very least take a stiletto to
the screen.

Kay Kendall: Just
when I get used to and comfy with a program, the company that produces it
changes it radically, then all the PCs move to favoring that, and then I have
to learn the new program. It is invariably trickier and just does more things
that I don’t really need. Annoying!


Jennae M. Phillippe:
The update cycle. I’ll be fresh and excited to start working on a project, turn
on the computer, and have to wait like 20 minutes for the thing to update. Or
worse, I’ll be in mid-project which it does one of those mandatory shut down
thingies. Totally throws me off.


Linda Rodriguez:
I hate that some programs (I’m looking straight at you, Microsoft Word) try to
make decisions for me that I want to make for myself.
Paffi Flood:
Nothing, now that I have an Apple J.


Paula Benson: That computers understand so many things intuitively, except how to fulfill my needs.
Marilyn Meredith:
What I hate most about computers is what I have to learn how to do something
new – which seems to happen too often.

Sparkle Abbey: We
don’t know what we do without computers. We work on them, we write on them and
we use them to keep in touch with each other. We both think we’re pretty
computer savvy, but there have been a couple of times when the computer has
eaten a work in progress or not saved it correctly. That’s frustrating!