Hola, Friends. I'm taking a break from the querying process to let you in on another benefit of being a single-parent without the benefits. As all four of you know...there are only four of you, aren't there? If there are more than four of you (Joel, Jen, Cheri, Katie...none of whom are single-parents), let me know. I need to just get with the times and start on twitter or face-book or something to reach those single-parents. But this blog, as all four of you know, is such a huge step for me...which brings me to today's subject: technology deficient dorks. See? I didn't use "geeks" because even though I don't know a lot about technology, I do know that geeks are the ones that do know a lot. So technology deficient dorks are people like me.
As the four of you know, I gave up my cell phone about five years ago as a money saving measure and I really don't miss it. That's not to say that I don't appreciate Jen insisting that I keep the Soul Sisters Center cell phone for emergencies and that I won't some day get my own cell phone again. I will as soon as I get an agent--an agent who will love my book and find a publisher who loves it, too. But for now, I'm perfectly content to live without it. But I digress. What the four (or more? is anyone else out there? a single-mom or dad?) of you also know is that until I commited to being a writer two-and-a-half years ago, I only knew how to check email. I knew a bit about Word because of nursing school 10 years earlier, and I knew about the hospital computer system, of course, but that was about it. And it was fine with me.
Today, as I was attempting to send out another query to a prospective agent, my computer was not cooperating. I knew from working on queries these last few weeks, that the computer was acting quirky again (Is Mercury in retrograde?), so for this latest query, I did the work on the Soul Sisters Center laptop (Jen insisted that I learn how to use this, too--I'm glad she did, thanks, soul sis). But when I went to copy/paste it in the body of the email as most agents prefer, I kept losing the scroll button and I would have to start over. But look, the very fact that I know about copying, pasting, scrolling is in itself an accomplishment for me. Katie, Jen, Joel, and Nate all tried to teach me at various times early on, but mostly, they did it. When Joel was gone and I began to fiddle around with it myself, I really learned and remembered how to do those things. So today, when I had trouble scrolling on the laptop, I decided to email it in an attachment to my professional email so I could download, save, and send it from my big computer. See? I can figure it all out on my own now. (Although, as I said, that computer was acting up, so the email never arrived until 2 hours later. I didn't wait that long; I ended up placing the laptop on my computer desk and retyping the query/bio/overview manually from reading it off the laptop...oy-vey! It finally worked, though. I got an auto-reply from the agency, so I know it went through.)
For sure I'm learning and growing so much more as a single-parent. Sure, I probably would have learned all of this anyway because of my job as a writer, but single-parenting pushes us that much quicker and that much higher in any area where we need to grow and I am truly thankful.
Okay, guys, please send me your love and light and send it to the agent that is right for me. Thank you, my four faithful friends. G (and here's a set of boobs back at ya) <3
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