Narrow Escapes

Narrow Escapes
Megan Goes Yachting

Narrow Escapes

I was playing a game of Contract Bridge with my Kindle Fire yesterday, when the screen suddenly went black. I thought that either the battery had run down without my noticing it or that it had crashed, since both have happened before. When I couldn’t restart it, I put it on charge. I have had some narrow escapes before when crashes have occurred while playing but not when I’m writing.

However, I went into a panic this morning when it still wouldn’t boot, as I do most of my writing on the Fire while I’m having an evening break and a beer. This can amount to 2,000 words a day when a book is in progress, otherwise about five hundred, so that’s between 180k and 700k words per annum – quite a chunk and I consider it ‘free’ as I’m doing it in my spare time.

I couldn’t accept that it had been caused by a virus, because twenty-four hours before, I had noticed the machine was slow, so I had downloaded a malware checker, and it had been clear.

Therefore, I entered the Kindle help page URL on my laptop and waited for it to load. The screen went blue and it switched itself off. I rebooted and declined safe mode, but I couldn’t help harbouring the thought for the briefest moment that they had infected each other with the same disease.

To my relief, the laptop recovered and revealed that the cure for its cousin, the Kindle, was to hold the power button down for at least forty seconds. I did fifty, pushed it again and it booted. Two narrow escapes.

The first thing I did was back up my manuscripts off computer. They are also in the cloud, but I don’t know, I’m never really sure which version of my files is up there. At least with an external hard drive you can see the properties of the files easily.

The second thing I did was go to the shop for a beer and write this. I’m pleased to report that all the old problems with slowness have disappeared, so what looked like a huge catastrophe turned into two narrow escapes, but with the added bonus of extra security and a faster Kindle

All the best,

Owen

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Owen Jones, Amazon Best-Selling Author from Barry, Wales, has lived in several countries and travelled in many more. While studying Russian in the USSR in the '70's, he hobnobbed with spies on a regular basis; in Suriname, he got caught up in the 1982 coup; and while a company director, he joined the crew of four as the galley slave to sail from Barry to Gibraltar a home-made concrete yacht, which was almost rammed by a Russian oil tanker and an American aircraft carrier.
“I am a Celt, and we are romantic”, he said when asked about his writing style, “and I firmly believe in reincarnation, Karma and Fate, so, sayings like 'Do unto another...', and 'What goes round comes around' are central to my life and reflected in my work. I write about what I see, or think I see, or dream... and, in the end it is all the same really”. He speaks seven languages and is learning Thai, since he lives in Thailand with his Thai wife of fifteen years.
His first novel, Daddy's Hobby is from the seven-part series 'Behind The Smile: The Story of Lek, a Bar Girl in Pattaya', but his largest collection is 'The Megan Series', twenty-three novelettes on the psychic development of a teenage girl, the subtitle of which, 'A Spirit Guide, A Ghost Tiger and One Scary Mother!' sums them up nicely. He has written fifty novels and novelettes, including: Dead Centre; Andropov's Cuckoo; Fate Twister; The Disallowed (a philosophical comedy); Tiger Lily of Bangkok; and A Night in Annwn (Annwn being the ancient Welsh word for Heaven). Many have been translated into foreign languages and narrated into audio books.
Owen Jones writes stories set in Wales, Spain and Thailand, where he now lives. He is a life-long Spiritualist, and this belief is interwoven, in a very realistic way, into many of his books and storylines. If you like a touch of the 'supernatural', try his books
He sums his life up thus: “Born in the Land of Song, Living in the Land of Smiles”.

Articles: 595

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