Technology Woes

As you may already know, our home internet, along with our phone line, has been down for nearly a week. We cancelled our satellite TV over a year ago, so have been getting all our TV via the internet as well. Our son gave us an antenna for Christmas last year, but he never got around to installing it on the roof or elsewhere outside, so it is sitting on the bookcase in our living room, where it receives spotty reception. It’s like the good old days, back in the sixties, when you had to manually turn the antenna every time you changed channels. The remote control is the only thing still working in our house.

Which reminds me, only a few days before this millennial black-out at my house, my laptop died. It’s not been a good month.

Last Friday, my daughter graciously gave me her laptop, which she hardly ever used. I’d put most of my files from the old laptop onto USBs over the summer, so haven’t lost a whole lot, and we were able to resurrect the device long enough to capture the most recent files of my current novel.

I had hoped to publish that novel and have a print copy in hand by Thanksgiving. Already a month ago, I pushed that date back to mid-December. Now, it’s simply not going to happen until sometime after the first of the year.

You would think, that with nothing else to do electronically at home, that I would at least have finished editing it, formatting it, and creating the final the cover. Instead, I’m lying on the couch, watching old episodes of Columbo and Bones, the only things of interest on TV via antenna, or the first two seasons of Friends on DVD. I’m looking at that whole shelf of DVD movies, thinking we may just have to start with the A’s and watch our way through them.

Our internet/phone carrier won’t be here until the 29^th to try to find the problem. Thank God for cell phones (albeit with spotty coverage). And that I’m still working part-time at the clinic, where I am posting this via their internet.

But back to my novel. Here are four more samples covers. Last time I asked your opinion, many of you didn’t like the circles with a different color background around the words. So, I got rid of all of that. Some people also thought there should be a blurb of what the book was about. There was also mixed feelings about having a picture of the schoolhouse and questions about what a RASA novel was.

If you don’t remember those other covers, you can check the previous blog post, otherwise, just let me know what you think of these. Also which tagline do you like better – “They won’t rewrite the past, but they can rewrite the now” or “It might take the future to save the past.”

Thanks again for everything. I love you all. Chris

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