Kindling

                These are the continuing adventures of the starship Scribe, whose lifelong mission is to make money from writing fiction.

                A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I went to our local PC World and bought a Kindle and a Kindle Paperwhite. Ever since then, it’s been a rigmarole trying to get them to work. We already had a Kindle. I bought my wife one of the original versions for Christmas; she found out, said she didn’t want anything to do with it, and I should send it back. I didn’t; I kept it myself; and over time I came to fill it with titles by M.R. James, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, etc.

                The screen froze on that Kindle after it was out of warranty. I suggested to my wife that I buy ‘us’ a new one. This time, she wanted one of her own. I’d like to think that I’d won her around to using Kindles, but I think the reality is this: on Thursday, we’re going down to stay for a couple of nights with my aunt and uncle, who are both well off and both IT savvy, so this was about saving face.

                Things seem to have changed since I bought that first Kindle. Nowadays, you seem to have to do everything on it via Wifi. Since we haven’t got that at home, I’ve been taking the new Kindles into public libraries, Starbucks, etc; trying to register them. With seemingly no luck.

                My wife said she only wanted a basic Kindle. The on-off button jammed on that, so I had to take it back to PC World. I talked to a gruff-looking man with a beard, who fiddled about with it before giving me a replacement. When I got home, I realized that the replacement was the more expensive Paperwhite model. We hummed and haahed about taking it back, before deciding that, for the gruff man’s sake, not for ours, we ought to keep it.

                But I couldn’t seem to register either of them via Wifi, and by now I was spending a small fortune on coffees, curly fries, etc. It was a revelation to me how complicated it is to get ‘free’ Wifi, with this cafe wanting your email address, that library wanting your membership card number, etc. I read a little bit about Kindles over the internet, and learned that, since they are manufactured in the USA, they are geared to US Wifi, which is different to the British one. If you’ve got your own Wifi at home, you can adjust it; but I could hardly nip behind the counter at Starbucks and start fiddling with their router.

                It felt like we’d thrown away £200. It was driving me up the wall. Finally, I got in touch with Amazon, and asked if they could register the Kindles at their end. They managed to register one, but not the other- the Paperwhite we’d been given by mistake. They couldn’t recognize the serial number. Could it be, by chance, some part of the mix-up? Some computery snarl up resulting from the fact that we hadn’t owned up?

                I lovingly replaced the second Paperwhite back in its box, then returned to PC World. I got the gruff bloke again, and was gearing myself up to telling him that I’d only realized his mistake after I’d charged it up. But he said that it was his mistake, they didn’t have any of the basic models left, and I should simply keep it. So I had a Kindle Paperwhite when I’d only paid for the regular Kindle. Which should have been good news; except there was something wrong with this one’s serial number; which I ‘didn’t know’ yet.

                Meanwhile, the original Paperwhite, although it seemed to have registered, still couldn’t get any books on it. Because I still had to use Wifi on it. I still don’t understand this; the only way I can explain it is with the analogy of the Channel Tunnel. France and the UK both had to dig half, and the two halves had to meet in the middle. I went back to Starbucks, back to the public libraries, and finally managed to download something.

                I went back to PC World the third time. I couldn’t get anybody else but the gruff bloke. This time, I was able to tell him truthful. He switched the Kindle Paperwhite on, and, using his store’s Wifi, registered it in five seconds flat.

                When technology breaks down, it really snarls things up. There seems to be no end to phone calls, emails, being kept on hold and being told that your call is important to us. And you can’t escape it. Even in supermarkets, if you want to be served by a human being, you have to join a massive queue. Otherwise, it’s a self-service machine which refuses to serve you if you’re trying to buy Paracetemol, until a member of staff comes over to verify that you’re old enough to buy it.

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                I haven’t posted to this blog for about a year now. I don’t know why. Events in my life were mounting up; and I wasn’t quite sure what it was for, any more. But I hope, if you’re reading this, that you find it interesting. And perhaps, if you write fiction too, that you find it helpful. Even if you’re learning from my mistakes.

                I’ve been writing made-up stories ever since I was at Primary school. Round about the age of 13, I decided that what I most wanted to be in life was a fiction writer. Actually, its truer top say that I can’t really do anything else; or, anyway, a fiction writer is what I’m meant to be, what I am, even though I still have to keep the day job.

                The type of fiction has varied. I’ve tried my hand at short stories, novels, stage plays and TV and radio scripts. I’ve gone from wanting to be the next Alan Bleasdale to wanting to be the next Nick Hornby.

                About three years ago, I decided to try my hand at writing prose horror stories. Initially, it was a bit of a lark, but then, to my surprise, I got hooked reading M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft, Bram Stoker, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. And I started getting flash fiction published regularly on the Microhorror website. So, even though I’m still not earning a penny, I’ve had more success writing horror than with anything else.

                The editor of Microhorror, Nathan Rosen, put the site on hold whilst he finished his Masters degree. That threw me. Plus, I had the nagging voice in my head that I ought to be writing something nobler than horror. Contemporary drama, perhaps. Contemporary fiction. That I ought to try tackling the real world head-on, rather than filtering things through a genre.

                A better way of putting it, perhaps, is this: that I still feel angry about the world, and the way that it’s going. And I need to try to channel that anger. Make my protest (or, at least, make it more directly than you can via a horror story).

                I’ve started, in my writing practice (see Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down The Bones), to write about things which happened to me recently, perhaps as recently as yesterday. Things I saw and heard. The man screaming into his mobile phone: “You want to wake up and smell the effing coffee!” The shoplifter running through the shopping mall with security guards on his tail. All with the vague aim of coming up with a straightforward, contemporary (non-genre) story of some variety.

                At the same time, though, I’ve just read a superb book, So You Want To Write Radio Drama? by Claire Groves and Stephen Wyatt, and it’s given me the itch to write a radio script. A horror radio script…