Connections and Respect...

Having got back into a steady routine of writing and blogging, my life was thrown upside down last weekend by not only losing my broadband, but my phone line too.

Okay, I know. If my phone line goes then so will my broadband. Unfortunately it happened the other way round for me...

I should add that we suspected our loss of service was 99.9% related to the engineer (from our provider) who was putting a broadband line in for one of our neighbours, as we lost our broadband about the time he would have been connecting up to the box in the pavement.

All the cables run under our pavements where we live, so we don't have any telegraph poles with wires running across.

But the provider's fault system requires you go through the testing routine, and of course their instrumentation said our broadband signal had no drop-out (!!!!) and the problem was our phone line-further tests then went on to blame our house wiring, and warnings that if the engineer came out we'd be liable to pay nearly £130 if it wasn't their equipment at fault.

So from Friday evening until the engineer arrived early Tuesday morning we were stuck. You get a lot of other things done with no phone calls, or Internet to distract you. (I read three e-books on my kindle.) But my desk had to be moved right up against my bookcase!

Very pleased to say that the engineer quickly found that the problem was outside, and as we'd suspected on the Friday when we started losing our service, it was related to what the other engineer had done.

Took about an hour+ to fix and test- even that wasn't trouble-free, but eventually we had a working phone and broadband line.

But it has taken the rest of the week getting the bandwidth back to where it was. And don't mention how many e-mails there were to sort through!

It's only when you lose your broadband that you realise how much of everyday life has moved online.

We communicate with friends and acquaintances from all over the UK, and in other countries, as if they were in another room. We use the Internet to interact with companies and services, even publishers! It's often easier to contact a company online than it is by phone...

The Internet has opened up so many resources that writers, a hundred years ago, would either have had to make a time-consuming trip to access the location, museum, gallery or specialist library and spend hours finding the information needed, or send lots of letters to get the answers.

My loss of broadband for those few days certainly increased my respect for those early writers. Their books may have been shorter word counts than we produce now, but they put as much, if not more effort, into producing their manuscripts.

It also makes you realise how much we take access to information for granted.

If the Internet hadn't been invented how many of those essential services and goods we writers depend on, would not have been invented? How many companies and organisations that employ, and sometimes support, people (including writers) may never have come into existence?

That's slightly scary...

I WON!

If you read any of my blog posts in December, you may know that I was a contender for the Nottingham Writers' Club,Writer of the Year trophy.

Usually it's presented at Awards Night in early December, along with all the other annual competition trophies, before we have the Christmas party.

Unfortunately the external judge wasn't able to get the results to the club until a week or so after the event - unforeseen delays on both sides. But as the first meeting in January was New Year's Day- a public holiday in the UK- it wasn't until yesterday evening (15th) that the trophy was finally handed over.

So here's the trophy being presented to me by Vice President,

Writer of the Year 2013-Carol Bevitt

Viv Apple.

Hopefully the next time I get presented with a trophy the photo will be able to catch me when I'm not missing a front tooth and can smile! :-)

My winning entry, The Ladies of the G.O.D Club received praise from the judge, a knowledgeable local bookseller.

I'm sure she won't mind me revealing some of what she wrote for the club.

"In a short story, time is precious, and it can be easy to lose readers' interest by adding unnecessary detail, but by selecting just the essential elements, Carol makes the most of her small word count. Her scenes are set wonderfully, ('rattan chairs', 'large metallic coffee pot', 'plump cushioning in cerise' – all add an instant sense of comfort and leisure), and characters' speech is designed to hint at exactly the right traits without being over-prescriptive: it is here particularly that Carol has balanced the 'show/tell' storytelling techniques most proficiently, setting her writing apart from the competition."

There's a bit about the symbolism used too, but I must admit that wasn't an element I was consciously aware of, it just came out of creating Jenny's (my viewpoint character) story...

My other entry was a 500 word flash fiction with an historical romance leaning. Admittedly, hard to do with a limited word count. It is a bigger story, which is probably why the judge said of it, " I feel Carol's imagination could be honed to produce romantic fiction pieces on a much larger scale: this short story has all the wit and personality to take her writing further."

So that was a great way to end 2013; and with the presentation of the trophy, to start 2014.

Sadly I only get to hold onto the trophy (and get my name added to the little plate on the side of the base) until late November, but I will receive a certificate this December to mark my 2013 win...

I have plans for my winning story so won't reveal it, but it will have a home somewhere and when it does I'll let you know where so you can read it.

Likewise the 500 word flash will be made into the longer story it is determined to be.

2014 is going to be a year of hard work...