Christina Hollis—The Shock Of The New...

I love writing with a pencil, on paper. My ideal is a black, eraser-topped Woolworths HB (a type that's vanishing rapidly, from both ends!) on the right-hand page of a brand new exercise book.

You know where you are with a pencil. The same goes for your Work In Progress, unless somebody tidies it away. This isn't the case when you get technological. Almost without exception the publishing industry wants manuscripts sent as attachments to emails, and specifically Word files, at that.

My OH has been in the vanguard of technological perfection all his life. This is why we had a Betamax video player,  and if only he had the time to kickstart a Kickstarter project, Spitfires would fill the English skies once more. As he considers Apple superior to Windows for word processing, that's what I've got.

Find out more at http://bit.ly/1GEkZkJ

Technology is not my friend. It took me six years to puzzle out the original idiosyncrasies of my first Mac, by which time age and an over-stuffed memory (the machine, not me) gave it the excuse to add a whole new range of quirks and failings. This meant daily overheating and explosions (me, not the machine) as every function took forever—by which time it had forgotten what I'd asked it to do, and just tossed up any old thing. Think predictive text, only worse. And unlike that this was never, ever, funny.

Yesterday, OH came home with a brand-new computer, just for me. It has a screen the size of our chimney breast, and goes like lightning. I'm typing on it now, but very, very carefully, as nothing operates in quite the same way as it did on Old Unfaithful. This means I can now lose all my work in a fraction of the time.

I'm off to get a few chapters under my belt to get the feel of this new machine. Meanwhile, if anyone knows how to retrieve my playlist and library from cyberspace, I'd be eternally grateful! 

When she isn't cooking, gardening or beekeeping, Christina Hollis writes contemporary fiction starring complex men and independent women.  Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages, and she’s sold nearly three million books worldwide. You can catch up with her at http://www.christinahollis.blogspot.com, on Twitter, Facebook, and see a full list of her published books at christinahollis.com

Her current release, Heart Of A Hostage, is published by The Wild Rose Press and available at myBook.to/HeartOfAHostage  worldwide, and from http://bit.ly/1iNf2Gw in the US.