Snow

 A bit blurry, but this is the front yard. 

Manuscript has been submitted

 After about 40 hours of revision, the manuscript is done. Is it the best thing I've ever written and will it be nominated for a Giller prize? Probably not. But at some point you have to just turn off the computer and say "Good enough," because there's always more you could do if you really thought about it hard, but you can't drive yourself crazy, and I have to go back to my job today. So it's done, it's off, and last night I rewarded myself by watching Chocolat and drinking hot chocolate. While the snow piled gently up against my windows. A perfect ending to a tortuous day.

While rewrites are a challenge, I do enjoy the final bit, when the plot is birthed and the bones are assembled and the flesh is built up over them, and all that is left is the final grooming, the word choice here, the turn of phrase there. That part is the artsy-craftsy part that I enjoy most.

Madly Writing and Rewriting

I have been up at our church for the past two weeks, working during the day and writing my next book in the evening. The story has been flowing along nicely, and I like the characterization so far of my heroine, Etta Purcell (who is 87, by the way. Why should the young have all the fun?).

In the midst of this flow, however, I got an email from my publisher asking for rewrites of the manuscript they're currently considering, and they gave pages of requests for improvements. That's all well and good, and I've never had a problem with doing rewrites. The books always turn out better when I follow the editor's suggestions. Except it means now I have to drop my feisty old lady abruptly and leave her hanging while I return to the soft-spoken monk and the murder in my other manuscript. The about-face is jarring, and it will take me a day or so to get into the flow again with that other story. 

When I'm writing, I tend to forget my characters and plot as soon as they're in the editor's hands, because I'm now immersed in the next thing. Going back to previous stories is always like showing up smartly to tennis lessons with my sneakers and racquet, all primed to go, only to find we're going swimming instead.

I have arranged to stay on another week at the church, where my evenings are interrupted by nothing more demanding than letting the dog out. Isolation gives me the chance to focus, to deep-dive, surfacing only occasionally to stumble into the kitchen for a handful of crackers. I can ignore the outside world and housekeeping and laundry and (let's admit it) all but the most basic hygiene and become swallowed up completely in my work. I can talk aloud, pace, gesticulate, and act out scenes to hear how they sound, without disturbing anyone or being self-conscious. Or like this morning, when my brain wouldn't shut off, I could get up at 2:30 and write without bothering the rest of the household. (I'll be in a stupor by 3:00 this afternoon.)

Hopefully something good will come of all this. Hopefully the publisher will accept the manuscript. But if not, I still have my old lady, waiting impatiently in the wings.

Taking a stand: facing the onslaught of technology

 I wrote my first story when I was six, banging it out on a manual typewriter too heavy for me to lift. It was only a paragraph or so and had a lot of exclamation points in it. I still have it in my filing cabinet to look back at and keep myself humble. I had to hammer the keys quite hard, and if I slipped and hit more than one at a time, the little metal letters would fly forward and get stuck together. It made a lovely ding at the end of the line, and I loved the ratchet sound of the “return” lever.

I first began to write seriously when I was thirteen. By this time my parents could see the manual typewriter wasn’t going to keep up with me, so for my birthday they gave me the wonderful gift of an electric typewriter, a blue Smith-Corona, with interchangeable ribbon cartridges. And a ream of paper, which I went through in about a week.

I would sit cross-legged on the floor (lacking a desk in my bedroom) and pound out stories by the dozen (they’re mostly still in the filing cabinet too). I spent hours every day letting my imagination pour out onto paper, and that little electric hum and the snappy action still form part of great memories for me.

By the time I was in university, we had a word processor…for lack of a better term. I think it might have been called an Image Writer. You typed on it and the words appeared on a screen, and then you hit Print to spit out what you had produced. The printer ran back and forth and slowly spit out the page, like an electronic typewriter. The letters were orange on a dark background, and it was roughly the size of a microwave. We thought it quite modern and exciting.

I remember touring the first computer to arrive at the university. We peeked in the glass window in the door to the room (yes, room) where the computer was housed. It took up the entire room and looked quite sophisticated with its reel-to-reel tapes. By the time I graduated, I was working as a professor’s assistant proofreading a manuscript for publication. I worked on an Apple computer the size of…well, practically a modern bar fridge. But it could do all sorts of exciting things my old word processor couldn’t, including using foreign alphabets.

I went to work as an administrative assistant, and when the fax machine was invented I was very intrigued. Would it transport me across the air waves like that kid in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory? I was quite disappointed to find out it sent only an image, and I couldn’t fax myself to Bermuda. I’d thought it would act like a teleporter from Star Trek.

And then there were personal PCs that were slimmer, smaller. And then laptops. And then the “stack” disappeared and the hard drive was incorporated right into the monitor. Cords disappeared and things became wireless. The square floppy disks gave way to 3” disks and then memory sticks. Then the ephemeral-sounding Cloud, as if we were uploading documents into heaven. Someone came up with cell phones that were smaller than regular hand-held phones, and before I knew it people around me were able to access the Internet in the palm of their hands. And then in their iPods. And then computers were being put in the corners of their eyeglasses. When we were using carbon paper, we were picky about who got copies of documents. Then the copier came along and lots more people in the organization needed copies. And then with email and document sharing, everybody was included.

My son’s video game became interactive with people across the globe. The TV lost weight while stretching bigger. Pong gave way to Donkey Kong and then to a host of games that, happily, weren’t all about violence but also allowed one to design a building, a farm, a city, a world. The VCR was unplugged and replaced with a DVD machine, which then became almost immediately obsolete. Movies could be streamed on the computer…beamed to the TV…watched in the palm of one’s hand. LPs and 45s became cassette tapes, which gave way to CDs and then MP3s and 4s. Emails flood my inbox, and my husband’s phone welcomes him when he walks into a store and bombards him with ads and coupons for that location. There’s underwear that gives you constant feedback on your vital signs.

And next they tell me my car is going to drive itself, and I don’t need to remember anyone’s phone number because the gadget just calls whoever I verbally tell it to. I don’t even have to turn on my own lights or adjust my own furnace anymore, because the house itself can do it. A vacuum automatically cleans my floors, and another automatically cleans my swimming pool (I named him Herbie). I can unlock my car from three provinces away. There’s a washing machine that adjusts itself to how dirty your clothes are and then dries them too (but, alas, does not collect the dirty clothes from my son's bedroom floor). There’s a fridge that will order my groceries for me. My computer automatically updates itself even if I insist I don’t want it to, and it’s constantly correcting my word usage, spelling, and punctuation (typing out an e.e. cummings poem is completely impossible). A phone can purchase movie tickets or grant access to the subway with a wave of one’s hand. The self-checkout at the store can tell if I take a plastic bag without registering it. There’s a red car driving through space, beyond Mars (I’m still trying to figure out the purpose of that one. It’s like the Chicken Cannon on Air Farce: what can we fling into space today?).

Can you hear me growing more and more breathless as I write this?

We are drowning in technology and advancements. By the time I master one technology, it has given way to something else entirely, and everything in my house will shortly be defunct. I freely acknowledge that some of the technology is great, like the advancements in telemedicine and air traffic control. Some of it is puzzling, and I’m not sure why someone would invent it. Some of it is just annoying. Some of it encourages us to be motionless blobs on the couch. Some of it, I fear, is going to take over people’s livelihoods.

Whatever the case, good or bad, useful or indifferent, brilliant or stupid, it’s all about constant change. Which means constant adaptation and learning, on a scale never before experienced by the human race.

I am not 400 years old. I am fifty-three. (There, I said it.) All of these things have come to pass in my lifetime. (My kids giggle that I was born before microwaves.) I’ve always considered myself a quick learner and a fairly intelligent person. I’ve kept learning throughout my life and think that until now I have had a pretty good grasp on things. But lately technology is outstripping me, and everything seems to be moving faster and faster and further and further. My time-saving devices are making me busier, not less so. I’m connected to people across the planet via social media but losing touch with the people in my own home. When I ask my son if he wants to play a game of chess with me, he replies that he’s about to checkmate someone in Korea.

Every time I turn around there’s a new thing to acquire and learn and pay attention to. And often, I’m expected to learn it by exploring, playing, and experimenting. This is not the way I learn. I want a bullet-point list telling me where to look, what to do, what button to push. I don’t want to poke around and figure it out by myself. I also don’t want to have to work through eighteen menus to reach a live person on the phone. I’m tired. I’m rapidly becoming a dinosaur. I’m dizzy, and I want to get off the merry-go-round.

But is it even possible to opt out? To say enough already? Is it okay to say I’ve got all the technology I want or need and really don’t want anything more? Isn’t my life going along well enough without having to keep changing and upgrading it? If it’s not broken, why do we have to keep fixing it? Can I step back from the race without having to join the Mennonites or live in a yurt in the woods and forage for dinner?

If I’m feeling this way, I’d bet other people are too.

Ultimately, it’s about empowerment. Choice. Freedom to decide for yourself how involved you want to be in the world. Freedom to draw a line and say “Beyond this I will not cross unless I really think it’s useful and brilliant.” Change for the sake of novelty is overrated, and I think we lose a lot of the joy in life when we let machines live it for us. (For that reason, I don’t own a Kitchenaid mixer. I want my own hands in that bread dough, thank you very much.)

I also do not own a cell phone, and if I did, it would only be to keep up at the church in case of emergencies, because my Skype can’t be used to call an ambulance. Assuming there even is ambulance service out there. (I should probably check that.) I’m okay if advertisers can’t reach me. I don’t mind Skype and similar applications that let me talk to real people and look them in the eye, though. During the Pandemic, that has been a really useful tool.

I almost never use the self-checkout at the store. This is partly because each machine is different and I hate standing there looking useless and lost, like I’m trying to print my boarding pass at the airport in a foreign language instead of trying to buy a $3 bottle of shampoo. But mostly I don’t use the self-checkout because I want to employ people, and I see them rapidly being replaced by machines. We have machines to give us money from our bank accounts, to issue us movie tickets, to do price checks on items, to order fast food…We even have drones now, delivering for Amazon. At some point, the people are going to disappear, and I want to draw the line somewhere.

I like to make things with my hands. I like to cook and bake and eat real food. I use an oven, yes, and electric beaters. I am not such a Luddite that I insist on chopping wood and cooking over an open fire. But I don’t need the latest gadgets and gizmos. My favourite thing in the kitchen is a really good chef’s knife. I like my guitar and banjo because they are hands-on and unprogrammable. I like my loom because it doesn't require electricity. (Though I suppose, sometime 5,000 years ago, it was considered the height of technology.)

I also don’t mind waiting for things. If I order a book, I don’t need it delivered within half an hour. In fact, sometimes I’ll wait a year so that I can get the paperback instead of the hardback. Or I’ll have it delivered to my parents in the U.S. to save on postage, and I’ll just pick it up from them when I visit every couple of years. I like the feel of books in my hands. While I acknowledge it takes technology to produce that book, I don’t want to use further technology to read it.

When technology starts to bog you down and it seems screens are everywhere, blinking and chirping and insisting you pay them attention, remember that these gadgets are not pets or children. They don’t absolutely need attention at all times. No one is forcing us to use them. Do something to disconnect and slow down. Walk along an empty lane, sit under a tree, do a puzzle, push a child in a swing (preferably a child you know), and just regain your equilibrium. Play Beckon or Hide and Seek. Skip rocks at the lake. Instead of looking at the pretty sunset photo someone posts on Facebook, go outside and look at the sunset yourself. Instead of watching Bear Grylls walk the Great Wall of China on the Discovery Channel, go explore it yourself. And instead of vicariously enjoying an authentic Italian meal on a cooking show, go out to your kitchen and make it and eat it. With hand-made pasta and slow-cooked (home-grown) tomatoes, and maybe even homemade ricotta.

Feed your inner dinosaur.

 

 

The long view

A photo by Dave Nicholson, I believe of Lake Huron if I'm not mistaken. This lake is twenty minutes from where I am now, at the church. There is something about being able to view great expanses, letting my gaze stretch further and further, unbroken, that nourishes my soul. It doesn't have to be a lake; a long, green field gives me the same satisfaction. Maybe it comes from growing up in a valley, where mountains (beautiful and majestic though they may be) always shortened one's view, or from living so long in a suburb, with buildings always blocking me on every side, but being able to take the long view is wonderfully healing and refreshing to me. My favourite thing about staying at the church is being able to walk one minute down the road and see vast expanses of farm fields.

Sunshine!

It is very cold out lately, but today the sun came out in a glorious burst, so I bundled up and took Brio on a walk down to the lake. The most brilliant deep blue sky I've ever seen, with only a few white clouds. Walked the path beneath the tunnel formed by the bare trees, their branches stark against the blue. Absolute silence but for a few brave birds, and my boots squeaking on the shadow-streaked snow. Absolutely peaceful and soul-nourishing.