My wife gets extremely frustrated with me over my use of technology. I love sharing stuff with my friends on facebook, and on text. To the point where when something happens at home, my wife says (sarcastically) “Are you going to share THAT on facebook?”
She has a point I suppose. I love connecting through facebook and twitter and text with my friends and family that I don’t have face-to-face contact with. And let’s face it, living out in western Queensland, five hours from the closest major city has it’s drawbacks. Not least of which is contact with like-minded people, and the friends we left when we moved.
So anyway, this week sees us both unplugging from all things tech because we’re going camping for a few days. I do have one exception though – I’m loading up my kindle with stuff to read, because I’ll have a lot more hours in the day to do absolutely nothing.
Apart from that though, we’ll have no phone reception, and no power to recharge devices I’d normally use, including my eee pc and laptop.
My wife thinks I’ll struggle, but I don’t think so. I’m taking lots of pens and notebooks, and have big plans for getting some writing done. I’m going to use the time to look at some ideas that have been floating around my head drive for a long time and see if I can flesh them out enough to add them to my schedule for next year.
I also have a series idea that I’ve had rolling around for a year or so that I’m very excited about, but need to really get the basics brainstormed and set down. I have huge plans for that idea if I can make it work, but I don’t want to go at it half-arsed like I have with my ideas previously.
I’m also looking forward to writing long-hand, which is how I started around 15 years ago, even though I had a pc I could use. When I wrote long-hand, I wrote without one side of my brain thinking of the editing process, and it felt freeing. When I type on a laptop which is what I do now, I can immediately delete what I’ve written, and that’s sad I think. When I write long-hand, there’s no deleting it into the ether. I also like the second-draft process that comes from typing out hand-written notes or chapters.
Apart from all of that though, I’m looking forward to spending some quality time with my wife and friends, and just relaxing. The home-brew beer and ginger beer will have a good showing over the next week, and I’m sure they will help grease the wheels.
Besides, I’ll have a whole weeks’ worth of photos and stories to regale my facebook friends with when I get back.