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The pen may be mightier than the sword but it was no match for the typewriter that quickly superseded it - which itself was surpassed by a very basic and none-too-user-friendly electronic typewriter that took one line of text at a time into its limited memory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.


It was on these trusty devices that my first serious attempt at a full-length novel - "Parallel Discovery" - was produced.  I say full-length, it was actually well over-full length running to five hundred and thirty pages of small, densely-packed type and a quick back-of-an-envelope calculation has yielded a ball-park word count of 235,000+ words.

No wonder it took four years to write and never got edited, or read cover to cover ever again.

I started on the next project almost as soon as I'd finished it, equipped with a new-fangled Commodore PC-20 (an 8Mhz, 8088 XT with 20MB hard disk for those of a technical inclination) with fully-featured word processing software and partnered with the (for then) latest thing in portable computing: the Cambridge Z88.

That combination saw me through the composition of my next novel, the much slicker and shorter (95,000 words) "The Wickedest War".  The Z88's rubber keyboard, eight-line LCD display and the confined writing space on the daily commute into London made writing interesting, but it did allow me to write wherever I wanted to and worry about editing and formatting later on the PC.

I grew to love my little travelling companion but time moved on, as did the technology and eventually the dear old Z88 was put out to pasture.  I didn't write on the move again for another decade and I'd invested in the newest thing in Noughties mobile computing: netbooks...

I know a few people who not only bought netbooks, but bought the same fabulous model of netbook - the Samsung NC-10.  It's been praised for its excellent keyboard and I've often favoured writing on my humble netbook rather than my desktop PC simply because I find it more conducive to the creative flow than my full-size keyboards.  It's not just the feel, but also the gorgeous rattle the keys make that seems to set the brain into creative mode.

Are you ready for your close-up? My trusty netbook keyboard
(Photo: The Author)

But like the Z88, the netbook is now considered old (in computing terms) and the technology has moved on.  Netbooks are yesterday's fad...apparently.  Personally, I thought a laptop with a 10 inch screen and decent keyboard was the perfect form factor for someone who does shed-loads of writing on the move.  But there you go.  That's just my opinion.

Physical keyboards got ditched in favour of on-screen facsimiles, processors got doubled or quadrupled up and users were positively encouraged to leave grubby fingerprints all over their screens because that was the only way to get the wretched things to run anything.  The smartphones, tablets (and in some confusing cases the "phablet") had arrived.

Except they didn't entirely ditch the physical keyboards and now you can buy any one of a thousand wireless keyboards to connect to your tablet for those times when stabbing repeatedly and frustratedly at on-screen QWERTY-ness just overwhelms you with despair.  I've tried lots, mostly in shops, trying to find a keyboard that reproduces the soothing tactile response and happy-tappity sound of my beloved NC-10 for a price that doesn't break the bank.

That's where the Microsoft Wedge comes in.  Its purchase was due to a fluke browsing session and complete abandonment of financial discipline or analysis.  I saw it available at half price and it was simply too good to pass up.  It feels good, sounds good and is incredibly quick to connect to my budget Android tablet and smartphone.

So novel number four, the current WIP, will be written mostly on my new combination.  The netbook will still get a look in, I'm not ready to put it out to pasture just yet, and so will the desktop just because it's sometimes easier to edit and format on a bigger screen...or two.

And in the future?  Who knows.  Perhaps we will dictate our works to our smart watches, or simply think our prose and it will appear before our eyes via the wonder of wireless contact lenses...I'm sure things will evolve beyond even my wildest dreams.

I've come a long way from the pencil scrawled pages in that A5 exercise book back in 1979 and I have to keep reminding myself that ultimately the tools aren't what really matter.  They help me write, plan, organise and a thousand and one other things more efficiently, but when's all said and done it's what's written that's important and that's what I've got to remind myself next time I get anxious and grumpy when my tablet battery goes flat, or the Wi-Fi drops out, or the anti-virus software slows my PC to a crawl while it starts an impromptu update.

Just so long as my most important tool - my imagination - keeps going I should be fine.

Speaking of which, back to the Work-In-Progress!  Now, where the blazes did I save that wretched synopsis...?