What I Finished By Friday: Reconnected Edition
After 10 Days Without Wi-Fi I'm Now Reconnected!
If you are wondering where my What I Finished By Friday Newsletter has been, I took the month of June off. It wasn’t on purpose, I just simply couldn’t tell what day it was. For the whole month. I almost drove to church on a Tuesday. I haven’t snapped out of it yet. You are opening this on Sunday which felt like a Saturday.
Then June 30, just as I was poised to return to the pen and compose something astounding for my Substack- the transformer blew for my development. Seven hours later the power came back on, but my internet did not. The next available Kinetic technician would be out to fix the blown modem July 9. Rather than FedEx me a new modem, or let me drop by an office and swap it out, Windstream Kinetic left me without internet for 10 days.
“I am a writer,” I attempted to explain to customer service, “I spend several hours each day writing and researching. I have a big conference coming up and need to prepare a pitch sheet for my new book and update the pitch sheet for my first book. I also have an editor waiting for a manuscript to edit, and I can’t polish, transfer it to Microsoft word in five parts and format it to industry standards on my phone.” I also mentioned that I have only one bar of AT and T mobile service in my home.
The stoic agent in Sri Lanka was not impressed. “The next available appointment for a technician is July 9.”
“I don’t need a technician.”
“The next available appointment for a technician is July 9.”
“I can fix it myself if you just…”
“The next available appointment for a technician is July 9.”
“Escalate this to a supervisor, please.”
“The next available appointment for a technician is July 9.”
It went on like this for numerous calls until they finally responded to, “OK, transfer me to someone who can disconnect my service. I’ll get ATT Fiber.” At least I got to talk to someone who spoke English fluently, didn’t speak from a script and promised she had sent a request to expedite my reconnection to an area manager.
Just guess when the technician arrived- July 9. At 7:15 pm.
Here’s the moral of the story:
I had time to get a lot of other things done. And I was able to glean enough connectivity from my hotspot to get some writing done. But what impressed me the most was the creativity that came from limiting my time on the computer. It appears that it helped me spend more time making stuff up than looking stuff up.
In fact, I impressed myself with a complete outline of both timelines for “Castle or a Cabin”. Then I impressed myself even more with designing a very brave point of view shift in the middle of the historic timeline. If you are unfamiliar with dual timeline or split time fiction, it is a novel with a narrative and plot in two distinct time periods, usually past and present, that are interwoven to support each other.
After all that waiting for the return of my internet service, I am about to head up to Northeastern Pennsylvania for the above mentioned writing conference; Montrose Christian Writer’s Conference… where there will be functioning internet service!
10 days without internet wasn’t so bad. I learned to be resourceful and to appreciate writing with actual pen and paper. According to Julia Cameron in her book “The Artist’s Way”, which just published a 30th anniversary edition, writing 2 full pages each day by hand is not only therapeutic, it is essential to creativity.
As for the month and 10 days off, I will make it up to you by posting something here or on my Facebook page once a day for the next 10 days!
