Hi, everyone! As if four days of power outage weren’t enough disruption, a few days later my main computer gave up the ghost. It’s the motherboard. For anyone that is not techie, this is Bad News. I need a new computer and there’ll be that annoying phase of getting everything working again. In the meantime I’m going to try to keep up with the Riskies (more or less) via the kind offices of the local public library.

Things could be worse, of course. My writing resides on an old laptop that is perfectly functional for word processing but is so old it’s not compatible with what my Information Services Dept (also known as dear husband) would need to do to connect it to the Internet.

It’s not really that primitive. It is annoying to have to go to the weather channel or newspaper rather than get onto weather.com. When I was missing an ingredient in my usual marinade for tuna steaks, I couldn’t go on foodtv.com to find an alternate recipe. I had to wing it. Well, that’s what the Regency folk would have to do. (For weather, I guess they’d ask some elderly curmudgeon of a gardener or countryman how his bones felt.)

The tough thing is the isolation when one is used to going online for email and blogging several times a day. As I am writing this my 1-hour time limit on this computer is ticking away. I’m not used to that! But think about it. Regency ladies might visit daily with local friends and relatives, and I imagine some did, but they also wrote lots and lots of letters.

Enough whining. I am trying to see some blessings in this. This week is the first of the three weeks this summer my kids are at day camps, and so far it’s been a productive one writing-wise. I can’t make excuses to go “look something up” on the Internet or compulsively check email and/or the blog. For a while, I’m free of hearing market news, etc…, that could raise those hideous inner writing demons that make me doubt whether what I’m writing is marketable this instant.

Still, I seem to be an web junkie. Withdrawal has me just a tad jittery. How about you? Anybody else go through web withdrawal? How do you cope?

Elena, hands shaking a bit as she types this post

LADY DEARING’S MASQUERADE
Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice for Best Regency Romance of 2005
http://www.elenagreene.com/