How I Ended Up with a Smashed Laptop and a Head-Sized Hole in my Wall
If you’ve come looking for a lighthearted feel-good story, you should stop reading now. This is not a romance novel. It’s more of a psychological thriller.
I’ll start by confessing that my tech skills could be better. Granted, I can surf the Internet like nobody’s business, send emails (with attachments!), produce short PSA videos of my dog preaching about social distancing, and even edit photos using any number of platforms like Snapseed, Lightroom, and Affinity. And until I discovered the latter, I was pumping out some rather slick-looking book cover mockups on MS Word, which is the subject of a future article here in Writerly Stuff…Mostly. But back to the subject at hand.
Easy Website Building
On a still-chilly day back in April when the pandemic was in its infancy and everyone on the planet was being asked to stay home, it seemed like the perfect time to begin building my own website. The moment I started, though, I knew, I just knew that I was in way over my head. There’s a reason why there are so many professional web-design companies around, and there’s a reason the good ones have no qualms about charging you the equivalent of three months’ rent for their services. Yet I was lulled by the sparkly, upbeat YouTube tutorials proclaiming that “anyone can create a beautiful, professional-looking website in under an hour!” The only thing missing was a rainbow-colored unicorn prancing around in the background. Oh, yes. They sucked me into their glowing utopia and made me believe. I believed!
By June, after an embarrassing number of support calls with my web hosting company, I was almost ready to give up. Almost. I’d begun to wonder if my problems were the fault of the free themes. You get what you pay for, right? So, I poked around and found a premium theme I liked, and bonus, it was specifically designed for authors. I happily shelled out the cash and jumped back in with the enthusiasm of a toddler in a ball pit. The instructions seemed easy enough. “Just replace the sample template’s photos and text with your own, and, voila, you’ll have your professional-looking site up and running in no time.” It started out easy enough. I’d get a page looking halfway decent, save it, only to discover all my hard work missing when I went back to it an hour later. I was constantly shouting at my computer Where did it go? Why can’t I see it? Why? Why? WHY? My poor husband. At one point I caught him googling “exorcists near me”.
Lesson learned: It’s tough to be a visually oriented person when designing your own website; you’ll fare much better if you’re able to think on an abstract, connect-the-dots level. I tried to be that person, I really did.
Professional to the Rescue…or not
Unfortunately, as a first-time author with limited resources, hiring a bona fide professional website design company was not an option. Through one of my writing groups I found a reasonably priced “expert” web designer who assured me he could get my site up to snuff. That was in mid-July. On September eighth he informed me I possessed neither the budget nor the “pro version of the software” necessary to get the job done. That was when the hole—in the exact shape of my head—came to exist in my wall.
Back to the Drawing Board
By that time, five months after embarking on the project, I was exhausted and broken. But damn it, I was going to pick myself up and crawl to the finish line if I had to.
That was when I came across a premade theme that promised it was different from the rest. It purported to be “the easiest front-end website package you’ll ever use.” Front end! Now they were talking my WYSIWYG language! Finally, my site was in sight! Well, it should be no surprise to you that I couldn’t make that one work either. It was the last straw, and it sparked something feral inside me. Before I could stop myself, I’d delivered half a dozen savage blows to my laptop keyboard. I’d never done something so violent before, but it took trying, and failing, to build a simple four-page website to drive me to that point. On some level, it was cathartic, punching the crap out of my computer. But euphoria quickly turned to despair when I realized that my poor, defenseless laptop was the only means I had of meeting my self-imposed launch deadline for my book. And there it sat, crushed, like my very soul.
Lesson learned: Don’t punch your computer. You will regret it.
The next day as I lingered hopefully in the computer repair shop, an utterly heartless techno geek delivered the final blow: my hard drive was “destroyed beyond repair” and everything on it was “gone forever.” I didn’t hear what he said after that, but I left the shop with a brand-new hard drive installed and three hundred dollars missing from my wallet.
Lesson learned: Backup often. Yeah, yeah. Obviously.
The whole sordid affair put me back at least a month. The looming book launch and no website with which to promote it were the least of my problems; I had to rebuild all the information I lost when I hurtled it into the stratosphere. Fortunately, I’d sent my 85k-word manuscript out to several last-minute beta readers, so at least that was still intact, and my cover had been professionally designed off-site. But everything else was gone.
It was a journey, but as you might surmise, everything worked out. How did I go from a crazed computer killer to being the owner of a website I enjoy maintaining? In a future post – after I’ve used my shiny new website enough to craft an honest review – I’ll tell you. So if you haven’t already, make sure to hit the Subscribe button to receive notifications of my upcoming articles here in Writerly Stuff…Mostly.
In the meantime, feel free to leave me a comment. Have you ever punched your computer so hard you killed it? And was it the result of trying to set up your own website? Or am I the only doofus in this category? I’d love to hear from you!
