After a cop-out tweet where I said I hadn’t written a Monday blog post because I was too busy doing ‘real’ writing, I felt a little guilty and figured that maybe I could elaborate a little.
My writing space and style is pretty darn haphazard. I bang out most blog posts in Outlook during lunch breaks at work (leave work signature on the bottom so it looks somewhat like actual work) and then email them to myself, but as for my actual stories they’re in dribs and drabs all over the place most of the time until I can get them together.
Ever since I’ve started my current story I’ve had little exciting flashes of inspiration all over the place and it never seems to be when I’m sitting at my lovely big iMac on that dratted wooden chair with a nice candle burning and a glass of red wine. I’m usually too preoccupied with keeping my cat out of the way of the keyboard and the candle - although I failed at this the other day when her huge fluffy tail dipped into the flame and she didn’t notice until I yelped and pulled her away from it. Then of course she glared at me as if that stinky burnt cat smell was all MY fault, and stalked off to lick angrily at the little frizzled patch in her squirrelly tail.
Sorry, distracted by cat. See? It still happens when she’s not even here.
The bulk of what I’ve written so far has been typed out in bed on an ancient white iBook – not even a Macbook, it hails from way before that – that I bought from a friend ages ago in a computer emergency when my old lappy suddenly and alarmingly bit the dust with a lot of half-finished stories on it. After that I didn’t write for years.
These days the poor little iBook can’t do anything on the internet very well, not even Gmail. I can’t download any word processing programs because they just don’t work on the outdated OS, so I type in text edit. I feel like having such a dearth of formatting options as well as stilted and horrible internet is much better for my productivity than having no internet at all. Mainly because I try to research stuff and then get so frustrated that I just give up, add a placeholder, and go back to writing.
I have a few scraps written in pencil in a small palm-sized notebook that I carry in my handbag, although I don’t know why I do it since these days when the bug hits on the train I just type it straight into my iPhone’s note app. I wrote a nice chunk of paragraphs this way on the trip home yesterday and was bitterly disappointed when we reached my station. Maybe I should have stayed on and hoped for a round trip.
I’ve also got a bunch of brainfarts stored as drafts in my Gmail account. I can see that number every time I open it up and muse that I should really get them out of there, but then I think – they’re so SAFE there. No critical hard drive failure is gonna take those ideas away from me… unless Google goes down, but then we’ve all got bigger problems. I’d use Google Docs as a backup but you don’t even want to know what the poor little iBook does when I try to access that.
So that’s it – now please tell me that other writers are as hopeless at organising their word vomit as I am.
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