from primitive to modern (writing impliments)
Heh!
I keep thinking about this, actually.
From the time I was, say… twelve, I kept spiral-bound notebooks. I’d write my English assignments in them, and then began keeping one separate one for “creative writing”. When I got serious about writing, I’d start at the beginning of one of these books, and fill every right-hand page, make revisions in the margins, and, when I got to the end of it, I’d turn it upside down and write once again, on every right-hand page. I was still doing it this way in 1991, when I began my first real erotic story. For many many years I’d protected my stories from prying eyes by writing in a hand that was nearly undecipherable- in fact, if I go back to those early books I can’t always read it myself. So when I wanted to make fair copies, I’d lost the ability to write legibly. I went to thrift stores to get myself a cheap typewriter, and found the most adorable all-mechanical model- 1930′s or thereabouts- on which I clacked away with a few fingers… Till my highschool typing lessons (training us to be secretaries, back then) came back to me and I became fast enough to jam the clockwork mechanism.
I had enough sense to move from that primitive little machine to a word-processor, in about 1994, and the sudden freedom of movement- the very idea that I could revise by lifting whole blocks of text and moving them around as I saw fit- was simply amazing to me. And I could retain older versions, simply by sticking a floppy disk into that slot! Not to mention, the words looked so GOOD on that glowing white screen…
