By Lisabet Sarai
I woke up yesterday morning (Sunday)
agonizing about this blog post. What should I talk about? We all have
our worries. I didn't want to sound whiney. I thought about a post
entitled 'Consider the Lilies', dealing with the futility of worry in
the face of life's grand uncertainty, and the need to trust the
universe. However, I concluded that would have been too preachy.
Maybe I should write a story addressing
the topic, the way Garce always does? I actually came up with an idea
(think about all our worries during the sex act!), but then I decided
I couldn't afford to spend my time penning a random tale when I have
a 60K novel due at the end of January and I'm only at the 30K mark.
(I'll file that notion away in my notebook for some future date, when
I've got free time – huh!)
How was I going to produce something as
creative as Garce, as insightful as Giselle, as erudite as Jean?
Being first to address each Grip topic is not an enviable status,
believe me. The rest of the contributors can riff on my post, or take
my initial direction and throw in a curve or two. Me, I'm flying
blind.
All these familiar, minor worries
faded, though when I got to my computer and discovered that our ADSL
was down.
Oh my God! No email. No blogs. No way
to check for comments or visitor stats. And forget about writing the
darned blog. How was I going to post it?
These days even a single day of
Internet outage is a small catastrophe for me.
I can check my “real world” email
at work, but Lisabet's communications are restricted to a specific
computer, with an encrypted drive to keep all my work and messages
safe from prying eyes. Furthermore, these days, the business of being
an author critically depends on connectivity. Without the Internet, I
can't communicate with my editors, my readers, or my colleagues.
There are rational reasons for me to worry about being cut off from
the 'Net.
My panic, though, extended far beyond
rationality. Disconnected, I felt helpless, alone, totally out of the
loop. No Writers list posts flowing into my inbox. No requests for
guest spots. No updates from my publisher. No notices of glowing
reviews on Amazon or Goodreads (yeah, right...)
And I realized that I worry a lot about
being connected, all the time. I don't have a smart phone and my
husband the security geek strictly forbids the use of Wi-Fi. When I'm
away from my home office for an entire day, I start to get edgy. I
know the email messages are piling up. (I typically get 100 to 200
messages a day.) I wonder when I'm going to have time to sort through
them. In a very real sense, the only time I can be Lisabet is when
I'm online.
When we go on a business trip or a
vacation – heavens! The anxiety is grueling. Before we leave, I
unsubscribe from as many lists as possible, to reduce my mail volume.
I try to pre-schedule blog posts, release and contest announcements
and so on. While we're traveling, it's usually difficult and/or
expensive to get online. When we went to France last spring, we paid
$60 for a SIM card we could use in our GSM modem, so we could check
email without worrying about Wi-fi malware. And we (both) took
significant chunks of time from our holiday schedule to handle
critical online issues.
I remember traveling in the eighties
and the nineties. No need to worry about connectivity. We could
disappear for a week or two. We didn't care who was trying to contact
us. Sometimes we wouldn't even look at a newspaper for a week. A
simpler, easier, more innocent time, that seems now.
I wouldn't want to give up this
connectivity, though. I love “talking” to all these people, all
around the world. I'd be terribly isolated without the 'Net. I'd
never have “met” Desiree, or Lily, or J.P. Now that I've got this
wonderful blessing, though, I'm always concerned about losing it.
The broadband link is still down. We
can't reach our provider – yesterday we were on hold for forty five
minutes. They're doing some sort of system conversion, so that might
explain this lengthy (and unusual) outage. Meanwhile, my darling
techie husband hooked up the GSM modem so that we can have a minimal
(slow, expensive) connection to the outside world. And so I could
post this blog.
Now I'm worrying about when we'll be
online again.
