MARCH 2024
Me and technology! At odds again. I have constantly failed to get my website to accept my JANUARY and FEBRUARY 'Writer at work' piece. I've lost the top of my landing page and can't get it back. Today the computer went berserk or it might be the mouse is crazy. Firefox kept popping up a new page, everything I was writing kept highlighting and vanishing!
The new and acceptable illustrations for 'Salt Run:' are coming along nicely. Jamie is good to work with and giving me just what I want. I am ashamed that I let an ebook copy out with the old illustrations. That copy even got into the Wishing Shelf award and I received some - quite rightly - rude comments instead of the expected short listing for the book.
Making time to write is still hard but I am getting very selfish and saying no to all the other volunteer requests. I'm sticking to working for the library, Forest and Bird and church for extra activities. The changes went through to our library and we now have lost all that lovely safe community feeling. But all the time spent protesting and writing letters did make the changes less horrendous.
Social media is almost ignored. I've learnt to use Blogger.com and AI. I took a MOC course from Adelaide University which gave such clear explanations of what AI needs and so have made myself learn how to speak to AI. I can get good results and now it takes 15 minutes and I've got my social media pieces and blog pieces to schedule in Blogger.com for the next three months with just a careful tweak or two. The trick to AI is to put in good writing for it to work from and give it clear simple careful instructions. I love the time it saves. My editor loves the time it saves here when I put my novel/short stories through Marlowe which does all that painfully slow work for her like counting the number of times I've used words, and maps out where the plot rises and falls. I would never use AI to write my stories but it is a good secretary for ,me.
