Some weeks, the life of a writer seems to have little to do with actually writing anything, but more to do with mastering the technology that's supposed to be helping make our lives easier - the software to help us prepare our manuscripts and the great programs that online companies have developed to help you promote your work when you've got it ready. The wonder of modern times and its technology; right!

Sometimes it can almost make you miss the days of typewriters and carbon copies. Not in reality, but in theory and sentimental memory, the idea sure does sound good. Especially after the week I've had dealing with printing and uploading. It’s enough to make me pick up a chisel and a hunk of rock a la Fred Flintstone for the rest of my projects.

Did you ever wonder if the world had screwed Bill Gates over in some previous life? How else could you explain the horrors of trying to format anything using his damned software? Come to think of it, how else could you explain his success without there being some sort of huge karmic debt involved?

I was seriously wondering about what I had done to piss him off in a previous life this week when I went and tried to print off the manuscript for my novel. At 340-plus pages, it seemed like a little much to do at home so I decided to put it on a floppy disc and take it down to a good inexpensive printer. That's when I ran into the good old demon of pagination and how documents can change from machine to machine.

Have you ever tried to make your way through the help file that comes with Word 2000? All I wanted to know was how to make sure that chapters didn't jump from page to page whenever they felt like it. When I took the disc to the printers on Tuesday, I knew chapter one started on the top of page three. It even said it did on the computer screen down at the printers when I checked it before hitting the print command.

But somehow or other the first paragraph ended up stuck on the bottom of page two like an afterthought to the table of contents. In fact every single chapter decided it wanted to invade the previous page. I had a complete manuscript with a bunch of hooligan sentences hanging around on the wrong pages smoking cigarettes and getting into all kinds of trouble.

I debated sending it to the publisher like that for two seconds. I could’ve included a note in the cover letter apologizing and making disparaging comments about Bill Gates' parentage and hope they'd be okay with it. I discarded that idea as quickly as I thought about it and realized I would once more have to make an attempt to figure out the mysteries of chapter breaks and pagination.