slow-internet

I’m at the beach (wonderful!), which slows by nature—but the Net connection is painfully slow here, so I’m going to blame my absence on that. It’s certainly part of it.

I have been working, although in a lazy way: Q&A for the P.S. section of the Canadian hardcover, another Q&A for the French film-maker, emails from my agent, my LA editor.

This morning I started the next draft of the plot, but was flummoxed by software. Grrr! Word 2008 is missing some critical features that it used to have: the capacity to print out comments, for example. Then suddenly—something I did, no doubt—caused the formatting toolbar to disappear. I could no longer even increase the size of the type. I spent way too much time trying to figure it out. Then I tried Mac’s iWork Pages programme. This software has a lovely feel, and seemed easy to master—but for one thing: how to split the screen?!

It seemed to me that both these programmes had loads of bells and whistles, but were lacking in some basic word processing tools. I ended up going back to Word 2004: I’m so glad I kept the old programme.

With all this, I actually did manage to get some plotting work done.

But now … back to the beach! (May my friends and family in the North forgive me.)