Blind Spots

I have a friend who is a concert violinist. She’s also a retired teacher–from private lessons to fifty-student orchestras, she taught them all for over thirty years. She has a masters degree. In the last few years she converted to Judaism and now she’s learning Hebrew. She also writes great mysteries (not in Hebrew.) She’s all-around awesome, and pretty darn smart.

What she is not, is computer savvy. Oh, she can do all the things most people can manage–email, Facebook, surfing, word processors, solitaire. But if there’s a way to muck up her computer by doing something that would seem completely innocuous, my friend will find it. I’ve put several malware/cleanup programs on her computers, and I keep them in my account behind a password so she can’t muck things up worse trying to fix them (trust me. There are tools this lady should not touch.)

Me, on the other hand…I do seem to be pretty good with computers, but math? I’m struggling through algebra this semester, not because I don’t understand it, but because I keep missing that one detail. It’s so irritating! At work, many of the staff will run a letter by me before sending it home, because I’m the girl who will notice that they’ve got “here” when they meant “hear” in the third paragraph. Yet I can copy an algebra problem that’s right in front of me, sitting in my room with no distractions, and completely miss the “-” sign in front of the 7. Then spend the next twenty minutes re-doing the problem, unable to see how the *&^^%& I could POSSIBLY be getting it wrong, the book is wrong, **&^%% algebra!

Of course, the thing with blind spots is generally you don’t know it’s a blind spot. It’s just that computers are stupid, and math is hard.

I’m rambling about blind spots today because I’m trying to plot out a new story. It’s a romance, so I want each partner sort of…slipping up in the blind spot of the other. They’ll be friends, good friends, then something happens to give things the teeny twist needed for them to see they should be together. Except I’m not sure how to make it happen.

Another tricky thing about blind spots? A writer has got to make it obvious. I can’t write a crisis about my friend who can’t work computers when she really needs to if I haven’t shown you at least twice (in completely absorbing, believable, and not boring ways!) that this smart, capable lady has Computer Issues. You won’t buy it, nor should you. Which means I’ve got to get those blind spots in early (like, starting close to where I am in the manuscript) and subtly.

So, yeah. Banging my head against that today, while I work on getting Captain’s Boy all wrapped up with a pretty ribbon. Here’s the first chapter on Turtleduck Press if you’d like to check it out!