The Struggles of a Bestselling Author

 The other day, half listening to the radio, I caught part of an interview with Lee Child, who is, I understand, one of the top-selling authors in the world, thanks to his wildly successful Jack Reacher thrillers. At one point he was talking about the mechanics of writing his books, and my ears pricked up. Apart from some early efforts in longhand, he has always, he told the interviewer, written his books on Microsoft Word (me too, Lee, with somewhat less commercial success). He used to be able to do this quite easily, but thanks to endless updates and 'improvements', he now finds himself unable to navigate what used to be simple tasks, notably pagination. Since the latest updates, he simply cannot work out how to paginate his headers. So here's what he does: he works with his previous novel as his document, deleting the text, leaving the pagination intact, and inserts his new copy into the old document. Result: a new novel, duly paginated. Ingenious, but hardly what Microsoft had in mind, I imagine.
   This was good to hear, after the blood, sweat and tears I shed over Word in the course of writing The Mother of Beauty (evidence of which can be seen by the sharp-eyed in certain, er, irregularities in layout, etc). I thought it was just me – but no: here is a massively successful bestselling author defeated by Word and driven to desperate improvisation to overcome the difficulties it throws in the writer's path. Perhaps he should get his pen out and revert to his original method... Why is it that every update and 'improvement' – of practically anything – only seems to make life more difficult?