Blogged Down in Technology

16^th February, 2018

News from the front! I have my copy of The Brine in Me back from the editor in Scotland! I’ve had a cursory glance through the first few screens (they left as pages but came back as screens. It’s probably none of my business). You don’t get away with a lot. The Brine is written as autobiography, and Mr Derek Gainsborough does not intend to muster all the incidents of his life into the correct timeline, he just wouldn’t write that type of autobiography. I forget to tell the editor this was an approach and not an effort to make life difficult. Which to be fair it probably has been. But the stuff that I mean I mean. The rest are just genuine mistakes and it must be thrilling for the editor to get to imagine which is which, which she is very good at. Good editors are like mind whisperers, they pick up on the intent behind the incandescent yelling of your mind-on-page and turn the faders down a little. Clever business, but I like to be at the yelling end.

Not that there’s been a great deal of yelling during a recent bout of lurgy. If that wasn’t dis-entertaining enough my brain took another week to settle into being able to write anything at all. But oh sweet mercy I got to fill the time by discovering the level of catastrophe that has befallen my recording apparatus! I lost some things, my temper possibly included, and concluded that the resolution on my camera is suffering some erectile dysfunction over its ability to get its pixels up. It looks like the lens has been filtered through a puddle from down the back lanes. The sound levels are… sounding like the person talking into it is from Essex so there’s no absolute way to verify that it sounds okay. I’ll be honest I’m not really one for being conversant to a high level with tech shit. When I was doing film school I understood the principals of film but always got my friend Curtis to operate the edit suite while I yelled instructions like ‘fade out!’, and ‘more sepia!’ while drinking coffee all over the expensive equipment. It was thirsty work and always tremendous fun but those track lines on the monitors always seemed to want more respect than I felt they’d earned, so I’d get someone else in to finger the buttons who’ll attest that I did everything, apart from the coffee stains across the desk.

I’m currently training my eyes to properly read the editors notes on the new edit of The Brine in Me and I feel that computers aren’t really doing enough at their end. It’s all yes or no with them, but sometimes I just want to kick and idea around and have a conversation. And then when I do want something specific, no, you can’t undo that. Well fuck you!

I have to work with computers a lot and to be honest I’m fabulously level headed about it, but I don’t like what they think of themselves. Not that they’re really thinking, but I know that they think they are. That makes me laugh at them, and sometimes makes life difficult for the person who’s got to talk me through the problem again. The computer loves seeing me go through that. I’m going to sneak up on it one night soon and hook it into the three-phase, blow a few of its cobwebs. I’m not concerned that the computer will understand what I’m writing here, and if it can … game on. But we have to play nice together while I’m working through all the good work from the editor. Plus my third novel is swelling inside that hard drive so I can’t just take the computer down the garden and leave it for a fox to piss on. I might just write so many words into the drive-hard that it explodes across my study. That’s how to do it. I’m always one step ahead of my computer. But looking at the notes and changes made by my editor, she’s one step ahead of me.

Come wanderers, come enemies, come sufferer kings …
JW Bowe xx

P.S! Anna urges me to point out that it is her who gets the pleasure of teaching me something new on the computer. She reckons that the teaching comes in at least three stages. Stage One she has to throw out because I’m not listening to begin with. Stage Two is letting me get on with it, until I make sounds of much wrongdoing on the computers part and she crosses her fingers that I do need to listen this time. We’ve just been through to stage three with making clear what version of the edited files I’m supposed to use. I don’t see why I should have to choose, shouldn’t the computer have sorted that out, otherwise what’s the point of them? They think they’re like the biscuit isle or something.

If you enjoyed this blog, and you’re impatient for something else to read, feel free to bunch up close to a free sample chapter from JW Bowe’s debut novel, The Meifod Claw, which is available now at Amazon, iTunes and on various other international eReaders.

You can also double up your sampling by following this link to the forthcoming fictional autobiography of The Meifod Claw’s wheelchair-in-chief, Derek Gainsborough. His life and apologies will be released next year under the sail of The Brine in Me.

JW Bowe can also be unearthed on YouTube and in various other ways through the Serious Biscuits homepage. Scroll down for further links, action and disclaimers.

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