End of an Era

So in a consignment of old practices to the dustbin of time, I finally took a step which to many seems obvious but one that I have fought for many years despite running out of money and disposable digits in the process. That's right, I have begun transferring my "works in process" to the computer.

Now, whats so new about that, you might think? Well, let me explain. At just months short of my twenty-first birthday now (you lot at the back, stop the heart attacks!) I have been writing consistently for nearly eighteen years. Yes, when the other kids played football in nursery school, I wrote up short stories about myself and a wee dog. Truly special from an early age, I guess. (Or just a geek, if you will). But anyhow, coming from a less than well off family, we couldn't afford a computer. So in the early days, all of my writing was done longhand. Which was a bit of a source of amusement for many, seeing as my handwriting's "legibility" is legendary.

(By the time I was 10, we can estimate that I had written roughly three hundred short stories, killing in the process about half a million characters, mostly on the same page they were introduced. Never let an impressionable child read Pip Baker, I think is the moral there. All of these classics are now, thankfully, lost in the mists of time.)

Now, eventually we got a low tech computer - an Amstrad if you wish to know, quit that snicker it actually worked unlike some Macs I know! - but my method was already well rehearsed and repeated over the next decade, even with the arrival of Windows and spell checkers, and deadlines.

So, I do type up on computers, as we all do in the end. But never until a first draft has been completed in full longhand. You might think this makes the writing process take forever. And you'd be right about that. But then I do suffer from what has been diagnosed as "stubborn gittedness", a terrible ailment in which I believe my way is right despite all evidence to the contrary.

But then came the straw that broke the camels back. Namely, there is nothing that is more painful (ironically) to do for long periods than copy from page to screen. This is mostly due to my trouble focusing on things. And Vamp, the oft mentioned book, currently stands at 7 thousand words. Yes, 7 thousand of a projected 100 thousand words. Now, bugger me if I'm going to type all that up at the end. The damn thing would kill me. And I have tonnes of short stories around that would probably get finished a lot quicker if they were typed up first, instead of drafted on paper.

So, now I am in the process of moving everything onto Mandy's laptop for further reckoning. Who knows? With the shelving of our more stubborn ways, perhaps the output will speed up even faster?

Either way, I'm tired. Copying up all these handwritten notes takes it out of you. And I really should stop laughing at my own jokes...no one else ever does.