Post the Sixth: Tools of The Trade

I found myself thinking this week.  My netbook had slowed to a crawl while the anti-virus software hogged the processor to update its library of digital nasties and neither my browser nor my word processor were willing to interrupt it.  Writer's block I can cope with and many creative-types down the centuries have suffered a dip in productivity because of it.

But dips in productivity due to constant software upgrades is a very twenty-first century problem.

I wrote my first story when I was eight.  It was a nine page epic written in pencil in my school exercise book.  I wouldn't say it was that good, but it was the start of something special.  It must have been special because my teacher had it typed-up, illustrated and two copies put in the school library.  My next attempt at a feature length story, which I started three or so years later, was also written in pencil to begin with but it soon progressed to being written in pen, as befitted a fourth year junior school  pupil heading to the first year of "big school".  The point is, the pen, pencil and paper worked.  If they didn't I got another pen, pencil or sheet of paper.  No upgrades necessary...unless you count a fountain pen in the first year of secondary school as an "upgrade".

Where it all started.  Two of the nine pages of the original
copy of my first serious attempt at writing.
(Photo: The Author)

The pen may be mightier than the sword but it was no match for the typewriter that quickly superseded it - which itself was surpassed by a very basic and none-too-user-friendly electronic typewriter that took one line of text at a time into its limited memory before it would print it out in a variable range of hard to read dot-matrix delivered greys.

The electronic typewriter was out of fashion (not to mention readily-available supplies of ink cartridges) pretty much as soon as I'd started using it.  But that wasn't a problem.  By the time I turned fourteen, I'd become the proud owner of a Commodore 64 home computer complete with a five-and-a-quarter inch floppy disk drive and full-on dot matrix printer.

Post the Fifth: Let's Try Something New...

Things constantly change.  Even when we try to keep them the same, or resist them changing, things change around us.  Even if we're not aware of it, or delude ourselves into believing that everything is static, things change.

Once upon a time (no, this isn't the start to a badly-written fairy tale), twenty years ago when my body was leaner, my hair thicker, my energy seemed to know no limits and the world was one massive exciting playground for me to explore and enjoy, I was all for change.  I hated things staying the same.  I was always the one who pushed for progress, sought ways to upset the status quo (not the band, the axiom) and went looking to mend things that weren't actually broken.

In short, I was a progressive pain in the bum.