7 November 2016 — 9:17 am — Lack of Progress Report
Ah, well. I actually got some verbiage written on a bus yesterday, writing by hand in a composition book. By the way, writing by hand often works a LOT better than trying to use a laptop while traveling. A composition book doesn’t need to boot up. Battery life is not a worry. The page is visible in a lot of conditions where a screen would not be (glare being the big problem). There is a VERY reliable autosave equivalent. You aren’t balancing hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of hardware on your lap, waiting for a bump in the road to make it bounce up and smash to pieces. You aren’t attracting the interest of whatever creeps might be in the seat behind you, such persons being more interested in the value of the laptop rather than your deathless prose. The solid citizen next to you is far less likely to have her attention drawn by the boring old pen on paper, as opposed to the bright and shiny screen. You get the idea.
But the other nifty thing about writing on paper is that you have a very handy chance to rewrite very efficiently later on. I always discover that I can type a lot faster than I can write. So typing up pages and pages of handwritten stuff takes almost no time at all — and affords me the chance to tweak, adjust and amplify my copy at that time.
Unfortunately, the last few days — more like a week or ten days, really — I have not been getting anywhere near enough sleep, and it finally caught up with me. When I sat down to type up my handwritten stuff, I was a zombie — and the computer I was using decided to slow down, and install some updates, and generally misbehave. I spent an hour trying to make the computer behave before I spent ten minutes trying to type (which the computer still being slow as molasses). I am on the same computer this morning, and all is well — but that doesn’t do last night’s attempt much good. I am just going to try and write like hell today, 7 November, and tomorrow, 8 November (Election Day — yikes!) and get caught up that way.
Thus endeth 400 words of copy on why I couldn’t get any words written — which is always the excessively ironic problem!
Until our next thrilling installment,
