Janet Gogerty's Blog: Sandscript - Posts Tagged "smart-phones"

At last I have seen it, three times this week. On Monday night my other half came home to find our neighbour, smart phone in hand, gazing at the sky. He was waiting for the International Space Station and within a few seconds they were watching it appear over Ken's garage. I was most envious, but soon our smart phone had the app; all we had to do was figure out how to work it. On Wednesday night we speeded up a committee meeting and ushered everyone out of the house. By 9.48pm we were standing in the middle of the road, not sure which way to look, then decided to stumble through the dark house to the back garden. Between 9.50pm and 9.54pm we watched the bright light appear above our roof, arc across the sky then gradually fade before it reached the horizon.
I wrote about ISS in my November 1st 2013 Sandscript Blog, inspired by hearing Colonel Chris Hadfield's 'An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth' serialised on BBC Radio4.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
At the time, a visit to the NASA website got me interested in ISON 'Comet of the Century'.
After 4.5 billion years at the edge of the Solar system and 3.5 billion years plunging towards the Sun, ISON came within 750,000 miles of the Sun's surface in November and was lost. There would be no light show in the winter skies and I didn't get Hadfield's book for Christmas.
A loss for bloggers and writers, but not for scientists; in the same spirit as the International Space Station, Worldwide collaboration observing ISON has enabled a massive collection of data.
With our long wet winter the comet would no doubt have been hidden from us by heavy cloud.
Clear skies this week enabled us to watch the ISS on Friday and last night; its height above us the mileage it would take us to reach the north of England, the 92 minutes it takes to orbit the Earth the time many people spend commuting to work.

There’s no time like the present, especially for authors. How long does the present last; a year, a week, a day, a second? Some novelists write in the present tense and this can work very well, but readers know the events have already happened.
My novel ‘Brief Encounters of the Third Kind' was set in the present; that was where I intended it to remain. I did not want to name a year; the characters lived in London and the 2005 bombings were still quite recent when I started writing, I did not want their story overshadowed by such a major event.
But first novels, especially long ones, take a while to write, be read by others and edited, the present was fast becoming the past. World events were turning out differently from what most of us could ever have imagined and technology was racing ahead. My characters had mobile phones, they took pictures with their phones, they Skyped and went on Facebook, a few of them had SatNav. But they did not have smart phones, tablets, I-pads Kindles etc. and the last thing I wanted them to be able to do was Google their location or look up information on the internet with their smart phone.
The novel became a trilogy. ‘Three Ages of Man’ begins before the first novel and runs parallel, ‘Lives of Anna Alsop’, published this week, opens the evening after the close of the first novel. The Brief Encounters Trilogy is set in the early years of the Twenty First Century and covers a period of nearly four years, that is all you need to know. But if you would like to know more about the three novels you can read about them here on Goodreads, or visit my website www.ccsidewriter.co.uk

Sandscript Skyping

Once upon a time the future was a Telly Phone. We would sit at our phone table, the earpiece and mouthpiece still connected to the phone by a curly wire, the phone still attached by a cable which eventually led out of the house and to the telegraph pole. But also on the table was a small screen on which we could see who we were talking to. Most of us wondered if we would like such an invention; you would have to get dressed before you phoned someone, you couldn’t leap out of the bath and wrap a towel round if the phone rang.
It has come to pass, but like most predictions of the future not in the way we imagined. At first we wondered what people were talking about when they asked if we Skyped Australia or the USA. It started with desk top computers, a time was prearranged by email or perhaps the real telephone, because it would not work if the other person was not on line when you called.
Now we use a variety of devices to Skype, Facetime and WhatsApp video; most people are on line most of the time with their smart phones. We are still chatting on the phone. In universal scenes, several generations may be peering at their ipad and greeting Great Grandma on the other side of the world, marvelling at the clear picture. Using a mobile phone enables the caller to take you on a tour of their new house or make you jealous as they broadcast live scenes of their holiday to your lap top.
It is not always perfect, the feeling of being in the same room can be marred by your loved one’s face becoming pixillated or their voices taking on an underwater timbre. Is it the weather conditions or the fact that they have Apple and you do not? We grumble, but it is a miracle that we are seeing each other at all.
In my novel ‘Quarter Acre Block', the Palmer family emigrate to Australia in 1964. Their friends and family have no idea how they are getting on until they write an aerogramme, then comes the wait for a reply. Phone calls back to England were possible for migrants, via cable laid under the oceans, a wonder of technology itself, but very expensive, with fathers standing by with a stop watch to make sure three minutes was not exceeded...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Quarter-Acre...