Never update.

Good enough!

I always find it a bit of a struggle to get back into the swing of work after being away. If it’s a long enough trip, say three or four weeks, I usually recover my enthusiasm for writing by the end of it. But then I get home, and there’s always some faffing around that needs to happen before I can actually get back to cranking out the words.

After this last trip, I had a pile of post-travel admin to get through, plus the copy-edit for The Forever Dead. I was hoping that by last week, I’d be back in my workflow, but technology said no.

It started with the copy-edit. I normally read through manuscript notes on my iPad, pacing around the house to keep the blood flowing. But last week, my relatively new iPad Pro—bought a mere three-and-a-half years ago—decided to cark it. One minute I’m reading, the next, the screen goes black. This happens maybe once every 18 months or so, so I didn’t freak out. Usually, it just restarts itself. This time, however, it tried to restart, failed, and defaulted to a factory restore.

Again, not a huge deal. My work is backed up to multiple clouds. I left it to restore, made a cup of tea, and came back to a screen I’d never seen before, telling me the restore had failed. And that’s when we fell into the doom loop: restore failed, please restart. Restart, attempt restore, restore failed. Over and over.

After three separate visits to the Genius Bar and one screen flashing a disturbing shade of purple, it seemed clear the iPad was dead. The geniuses at the Fruit Company were pretty good about it and offered me a decent trade-in credit even though I was well out of warranty, so I walked out with a new iPad Air and, um, a new iPhone 17 Pro Max—since I was on a roll and my old phone had been acting up anyway.

Thankfully, the new phone restored from iCloud without a hitch. But as anyone who’s changed phones recently knows, that just kicks off a whole new level of admin hell: logging back into every high-security app. My banking apps… and one I hadn’t thought about, the Volvo app that acts as a digital key for our car. Of course, the car no longer recognised the key. After a frustrating morning with Volvo support, that’s still not resolved. And don’t get me started on the hour I spent on the phone with the bank, after an even more frustrating hour trying to get through to the bank because of course need the app to verify your identity before they’ll even speak to you.

So, yeah, not a lot of writing got done. There’s a lesson in all this, I suppose. Never, ever update your technology.