I had to laugh at Amy’s post yesterday. I just finished watching the first season of Buffy. Okay I’m sometimes slow on the uptake. So when fiber optics came to my neighborhood, I signed up. First on my block. Cutting edge. It’s great. Fast internet, clear television. Only one little hitch. When they set it up, it disabled all my printers. Fortunately I ran a test while the installer was loading up his truck. He knocked around my computer for an hour and nothing. So he left.
Like a good ostrich, I went to dinner.
Needless to say the problem didn’t go away. In fact, not only did I not have a working printer, my entire computer queue was gone! I reinstalled. Nothing. I went to bed. A full day, three hours and ten minutes of which were on the phone to tech support, an hour at the computer store and I don’t know how many reintallations later, I still had no printers. I tried a USB connector. I was so over sharing my printers with anyone. I just wanted them back. Even the old slow workhorse that I complain about all the time, but never lets me down. (Are you wowed by all this computerese? Desperation makes you an expert fast)
That’s when I started really appreciating all those authors who wrote (and some who still write) with a pen. No changing around paragraphs and cutting and pasting for those writers, unless they used scissors and a scotch tape. All those strike throughs and rewrites made reading a nightmare I’m sure, but at the end of the day they held their work in their hot little hands.
I love hard copy, the feel of the paper, the way the pen moves across the page. I always edit from hard copy. Often if I find a scene moving too fast, I move away from my lap top and write it out long hand. It slows everything down and lets me savor the action, the emotion of a scene.
Imagine someone like Dickens writing installments of Oliver Twist for the newspaper. No getting to chapter twenty and deciding it should be where chapter four is, and chapter four should really be chapter seven, and with a few keyboard commands. Voila! The changes are made. Dickens was stuck with what he wrote as he wrote it.
It’s kind of mind boggling. And I bless my little laptop. But I still have to have that print out. And always will.
And if anyone wonders what happened next in my technology saga: today I have a printer. Not my printers, but a new printer with a USB connection. But I also have a new stack of spiral notebooks and a package of ball point pens. Just in case . . .
Do you love technology or long for simpler times? Am I the only person just catching up with Buffy?
I have loads of pens around me and plenty of paper. . . but since I do so much typing and the only letters I do are email, my writing stinks. It feels like my hand can’t do handwritting anymore. LOL Definitely lost something when it comes to technology there.
Lois
When I write my poems or reviews I use paper and pen. I then transfer it to the computer and save it, then I shred the paper. But, I also love my computer, I save everything I need to and am able to communicate with everyone without having to write a long letter and mail it.
I love technology and if it’s taken away from me, I don’t know what I would do. I think the only thing that I use a pen and paper for is when I write poetry or notes on those yellow sticky pads.
I am a internet junkie, but I could live without some of the technology that we use so frequently. When I write I use the lap top, but if I am at work and get inspiration, I will hand write my thoughts and then transfer them to my laptop that evening. I never watched Buffy.
I love my internet – am always on it.
I remember the days when there was no computer and you had to use carbon paper when typing and the mimeo paper and that purple duplicatng paper. What a mess.
And forget it, if you left a word or paragraph out, forget it. What a great invention.