R.I.P. My Kindle

Well, after a long and fulfilling life, my beloved Kindle finally bit the dust. It had been showing signs of disease for the last few months - spontaneously erasing books and freezing without warning. But I refused to see the signs due to my ongoing go-to avoidance technique, denial. But now it's been three days since I've been able to get more than a hiccup from the poor thing, so I guess it's time to take it out to the woodshed and put it out of its misery. I loved that damn thing. It changed my life, and now it's in a drawer with my ancient Walkman and the pedometer I never use but can't quite throw out.

It wasn't love at first sight for my Kindle and I. It was a Christmas present from my mom back in 2010 and I hadn't quite decided if I wanted an e-reader or not at that point. I didn't entirely understand how it worked and I'm really too impatient to read instructions so it actually took me several weeks to get to the point where I was actually able to download books. Even then I still loved the feel of a "real" book in my hand, the beautiful covers, and the ease of lending a beloved title to a friend and actually sharing the reading experience with them. So I thought I would use my Kindle when I travelled or possibly at the gym at the most.

Man, was I wrong. It quickly became my constant companion. I've downloaded books everywhere you can imagine: on planes, on beaches, in the parking lot of various hiking trails around the lower mainland, on ferries, even in the chemo ward while I was undergoing treatment for Breast Ca.

Not to sound like a paid advertisement but my beloved Kindle has really and truly improved my life dramatically. Not just because I can buy as many books with shirtless men on the cover without worrying about judgy sales clerks at Chapters either. It was also responsible for re-introducing me to writing again.

How? Well, I wasn't very savvy when I first started downloading books and I kept coming across these really horribly edited romance novels. I mean bad, bad, bad. Like, ejaculate was spelled ejackulait. Seriously. How did the editor not catch that? Then I did some research and discovered that these were self-published works. What? Amazon apparently would allow just anyone to publish their work. For free!!! It seemed too good to be true.

It still took me several months to get up the nerve but I finally mustered my cajones and downloaded my unpublished romance novel, Lost & Found, just as an experiment the week before Christmas 2011. I didn't really think anyone would download it but it actually turned out to be quite successful. Even with its Mommy-porn cover that I downloaded from Jimmy Thomas's website. (Thanks Jimmy.)This, of course, motivated me to write six books in 2012 which officially made me writer again after giving up on that dream a decade earlier.

I'm not certain if I would have tried self-publishing if not for that 2010 Christmas present so I'm more than grateful to my mom for the gift, but also to that little piece of technology which pushed me to try something new and take a chance on being a writer again.

I will miss you, my friend. Thank you for the many, many hours of (dirty) pleasure, but also for opening up a door I thought was closed to me. My life has been irrevocably improved because of you. My new paperwhite will never replace you. Well, not entirely...