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The toddler in my laptop

3/8/2018

Imagine a virus has attacked your vocal chords, when your livelihood – not to mention your sanity – depends on clear communication. You can create sounds, but they are incomprehensible to others – a jumbled babble. Then, one day, as you jabber in frustration while preparing your children’s tea, your toddler’s voice rings out, perfectly articulating what you were trying to say.

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Is reading onscreen different to reading in print?

27/2/2017

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This month, my book group is reading George Eliot’s Romola. As out-of-copyright books often come in tiny print, I didn’t want to order a paperback and, by the time I got round to consulting the local library catalogue, it was too late to order it from a distant branch. So I did a very rare thing for me – actually Mr A kindly did it on my behalf – and downloaded the free digital version to read on his tablet.

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The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan

22/9/2016

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What was a bomb, really? A means of separation, of opening. A factory of undoing. It took the violent forces of civilisation and applied them to the very opposite aims with a childlike glee. A bomb was like a child. A tantrum directed at all things. A wail of a being that hadn’t got its own way.

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Sounding out the body in fiction

7/8/2016

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I spent what seemed to me a considerable amount of time flushing out what I thought was a bit of leek stuck between my upper right incisor and its neighbouring canine – first with my fingernail, then with the corner of a business card, and finally with a sharpened matchstick. But there was no piece of leek. It was an erroneous message that my gums were sending me, themselves misled by some previous irritation.

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Voice recognition software

11/1/2013

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I've recently bought a new laptop. Presumably the updated technology will make my writing life easier in the long term but, in the short term, I find the whole thing a pain. Even with my husband taking on most of the donkey work, time spent weighing up the virtues of different models followed by
learning the quirks of a new operating system is time away from writing, as far as I'm concerned, and that's before I get started on the guilt at what the rich world's lust for progress does to the impoverished south.

I wonder if creative writing would be so popular these days if we didn't have
such easy access to word processing technology. I doubt I could've managed several drafts of a 100,000 word novel on my mother's old Olivetti portable where, if I got overexcited and typed too fast, the keys clumped together in the middle. I suppose if you were to develop RSI in those days, you'd either have to hire a secretary or fall by the wayside. One way of weeding out the competition.

Due to RSI, which crept up on me in the middle of an MA course (not a writing MA) over ten years ago, I'm dependent upon voice recognition software for all my writing.

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In the dying days of the old asylums, three paths intersect.

The toddler in my laptop

Is reading onscreen different to reading in print?

The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan

Sounding out the body in fiction

Voice recognition software

2021 Reading Challenge

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