SlowpokeBlog

Putting out a book is never without bizarre hassles, but the technology-related difficulties I have experienced putting out my latest just take the cake.

The tale of woe begins with the day before I left for my mountain redoubt in December. Central Virginia was hit with an unusually strong windstorm, knocking out my power – and heat, and water, and phone (my house is extremely electricity-dependent) – at 2pm on a Sunday afternoon. It stayed out all day. Packing in the dark was tricky enough, but there was another problem: the files for my book were on my desktop computer. I know, I know, I should have backed them up. I was going to do it that very afternoon, honest!

Nightfall rolled around, and it became clear that the power might very well not come on until after my flight left the next morning. So Mr. Slowpoke and I took apart my desktop computer by candlelight, loaded all the components into the car, and started driving into town. I called a friend on my cellphone (which incidentally doesn’t work at my house, even under normal circumstances) to ask if I could use her electricity. Fortunately, she was home. I reassembled my computer in her dining room, grabbed the files, and heaved a great sigh of relief. As I’d expected, we still had no electricity when I left the next morning.

Fast forward a week and a half. Mr. Slowpoke accidentally destroyed the laptop I was working on. We won’t go into details out of respect for Mr. Slowpoke, except to say a smashed laptop monitor looks really weird when illuminated. Now, the laptop was ancient and on its last legs already, so that was no great loss. I had also backed up most – though not all – of my book files. I had to rewrite a few pages, which took a day. The biggest inconvenience was not having a computer to call my own during the few weeks I had set aside explicitly to work on the book. I wound up having to share others’ computers, which slowed me down a bit, but I ultimately got a manuscript done.

My labors finally complete, I burned a CD with the book’s interior pages and gleefully sent it off to the designer. He quickly informed me that he couldn’t open the CD on his Mac. I had burned the files in Windows format, which in my experience shuttling between PCs and Macs, have always been readable on both platforms. Well, I guess there’s some new Vista format that isn’t. The poor guy went to untold lengths to find a computer that could read the disc, and eventually succeeded, though not before I’d begun tearing my hair out.

Which brings us to today. I just need to complete the back cover and send a few more files to the designer, and then I’m finished. The book needs to get to the printer this week. I’ve got no time to waste.

Enter another fantastic windstorm, even worse than that day in December. Objects are flying all over our yard; the huge bin in which we keep our recyclables just blew off the deck. Our power blinked out at almost the same moment, around 2pm, just before I could send this week’s color cartoon off to papers. Once again, all the files I need are on my desktop computer. It will probably be tomorrow before we have power, or heat, or water, or phone, or internet. And people wonder why I’m a slowpoke!

Granted, it’s a millionth of what the Iraqis go through every day, and I’ll gladly take my situation over the devastation that hit Arkansas and Tennessee last week. But still, you should understand the suffering that has gone into the new Slowpoke book, and buy yourself a copy and one for everyone you know!

(The above was written at home; I am now in a coffee shop, about to return to my cold, dark abode.)