IWSG: A Whine and a Giveaway

It’s time for another group posting of the IWSG: Insecure Writer’s Support Group! Time to release our fears to the world – or offer encouragement to those who are feeling neurotic. If you’d like to join us, click on the tab above and sign up. We post the first Wednesday of every month and encourage everyone to visit at least a dozen new blogs and leave a comment. Your words might be the encouragement someone needs.

IWSG is the brainchild of our noble Ninja Captain and leader Alex J. Cavanaugh!

Our hashtag is @IWSG

The awesome co-hosts today are:

Yolanda Renee, Tyrean Martinson, Madeline Mora-Summonte , LK Hill, Rachna Chhabria, and JA Scott!

Right from the start, (1987) I became one of those people who couldn’t imagine life without a computer or access to the Wide World Web. Consequently, I’ve never handled “issues” very well. When something goes wrong or I can’t get online, my heart jumps into my throat, my neck muscles tighten, my body heat shoots up, and blood rushes to my brain.

I pride myself on keeping calm, I meditate, practise T’chi, but none of that helped last month. June was horrible. I kept getting error messages on “everything.” Since downloading El Capitan, my macbook freezes or jumps to the blue screen. Sometimes, it’s four or five attempts at resetting the RAM before it will open.

My mac desktop doesn’t like El Capitan either and has started doing bizarre things like hiding files, screwing up my word and excel files, freezing, wobbling, and more! To top it off, my blogger blogroll quit. My url no longer points to a valid RSS feed.

I’m embarrassed to admit I spent almost the entire month of June trying to fix the problem. The fact I couldn’t fix it left me feeling as if I was starting over as a blogger. Now, when I post something, Feedburner doesn’t update anyone’s blog, including mine, so none of my readers know I’ve posted anything. I finally got the subscription to ping, but it’s a day late. Did I mention it takes two days to format my posts so they don’t look like gibberish when they air? While I’m constructing the post, it keeps warning me that my unsaved changes will be lost if I close. But I don’t want to close!

My dictionary is in Russian. Guess what else? My iPhone screen is frozen and won’t reset because Mac will no longer recognize it. The numerical pad on my keyboard died. Then there’s the issues with Mail. I’ll spare you details. Suffice to say, I know I’m going to have to break down and haul my mac and macbook to town, an hour’s drive. My biggest fear: he’ll say, “Sorry, Lady.”

I’m thinking the other solution may be to switch to WordPress, but will that really help? Or will I just transfer the errors over there?

That’s my whine for today. Thank you for listening.

Hopefully you’ve heard we’re incorporating a question for those of you stuck on what to write about. This month’s question is:

What’s the best thing someone has ever said about your writing?

I once asked a Vietnam vet, I barely knew, if he’d read a rough copy of my manuscript Kiss of the Assassin to see if the firefight scenes were believable. Part of the story takes place in Cambodia during the war. When he finished, he asked me when I’d been in-country. I walked on clouds for days.

August’s question is: What was your very first piece of writing as an aspiring writer? Where is it now? Collecting dust or has it been published?

Before you go, I have a new novel coming out November 1, 2016, Mâtowak: Woman Who Cries. There’s a book giveaway on Goodreads that I hope you’ll check out.