I finally sorted my writing problems, in more ways than one.

My first problem that I last wrote about was the difficulty of writing in very bright sunshine, where the glare on the screen made it unreadable.  The solution to that was ridiculous in its simplicity – all I had to do was change my Windows colour scheme from the standard to High Contrast White.

That took care of that!

My other problem was the story line I am working on for my Magnum Opus.

I had the main theme of the story and quite a few interesting strands to weave through it.  But no matter how hard I tried, it didn’t work.

I have made about five false starts, on occasion getting up to two or three thousand words, but each time the plot fell on its face in a mire of contrived and patently ridiculous scenes.

There was something wrong somewhere.

One evening I was sitting out enjoying the last of the sun and just letting my mind wander, when suddenly I had an idea.

My main character has been happily married for years, and it was the wife who kept upsetting the plot.  I had my brainwave!

I killed the wife.

So the story starts with my main character as a widower.

Immediately everything (or nearly everything) fell into place.  New scenes presented themselves and the plotline is a lot stronger.  I am well into it at this stage with several thousand words under the belt.

Whoever said that killing the wife is a bad thing?

The weather here in the Peregeux region of France is beautiful.

We have been here two weeks so far and have only had one morning of rain.  The rest has been blistering sunshine.

This has led to a bit of a problem.

One of the things I intended to do here was to write.  The ideas are flowing and the urge to write is strong, but I am torn.

Do I sit indoors and type away while the sun blazes outside?  No.  That would be tantamount to sacrilege.  I did not come six hundred miles to sit indoors and type.

Do I sit outdoors and type away in the sunshine?  That would indeed be my ideal, and I have in fact tried doing just that.  However, laptops and sunshine just do not mix.  I am not worried about the lack of power outside as this laptop has a very good battery life.  What stops me is the glare on the screen.

No matter how I set up the laptop, I find myself squinting through the glare trying to find where my curser is, and what exactly I have typed.

To say that this is frustrating is to put it mildly.

Feckit.

I think the sun wins.

Grandad uses Twitter occasionally, as do I.

He had the gross misfortune to somehow get tangled with a thing called Mobsterworld.

Having got his password they then proceeded to bombard all his followers with DMs [Direct Messages] purporting to come from him, and inviting everyone to join.

Needless to say, his followers were not too happy.

I changed his password.  That was no problem.

However, this Mobsterworld crowd weren’t too happy as they were trying to access his account using his old password, and they were trying repeatedly.  As a result, the account was locked by Twitter, due to the number of unsuccessful atempts.

So here is a warning to all Twitterers –

Under no circumstances, join Mobsterworld.  Do not be taken in by ANY DM inviting you to join a Mafia gang.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

One of the big problems I find about travelling abroad is navigation.

I am an avid map reader, and have no problem with actually finding a place, but when it comes to driving there, maps have serious shortcomings.   For a start, either the route has to be memorised or frequent stops are needed.  Also, the majority of maps that I carry tend to indicate a large town as a blob on the paper which isn’t much use.

Last year, I bought myself a SatNav – a Garmin Nuvi 760 – and this has become more than an essential part of my trips abroad.

Not only does it give extremely accurate information about where I am, such as what speed limit is currently in force, but is invaluable when looking for, say, fuel or an ATM.  Where it really comes into its own though is in direction finding from A to B.

There is an inherent problem though, as I usually know where A is, but programming B in can be problematic.  Suppose I want to visit a town some miles away?  I can type in the name of the town, but then the SatNav requires an address to go with it.  Usually it gives a list of streets that I can select, but for all I know, I have just set directions to the middle of a housing estate some distance from the town centre where I actually want to go.

I have developed a technique which I find extremely handy.

Suppose I want to spend a day wandering around a town some twenty miles away.  I have never been in that town before, so I have no idea of street names, or of one way streets.  The answer could not be more simple.

I go to Google Earth and look up the town.  I then zoom in looking for car parking.  Car parks are usually very easy to find on satellite images.  Having found the spot I am looking for, I read the Latitude and Longitude coordinates off Google Earth and feed them into the SatNav.  Simple.

I have done this for several towns now and the result is uncanny.  Not only does my SatNav give me directions to the town, but it navigates me safely through any one way streets and deposits me at the car park of my choice.

What more could anyone want?