The posts on this blog have been less and less frequent lately, which I'm not very happy about. It's also starting to get a bit heavy on the social issues. Sure talking about feminism and misogyny and stuff gets me excited but I don't want to do it every damn time I do a blog post, and I don't want to subject you guys to the same old rhetoric. I'd rather tell stories.
Now the reason I haven't been putting up little tidbits and excerpts of stories is that I've gone old-school. For almost the past year I've been using a Smith Corona XD 5700 electric typewriter which I picked up for $10 in Vancouver. It was one of the last generations of typewriters before fully computerised word processors came about. It has a little screen and line-by-line memory, so you can go into the special mode and type a line into the memory and then hit print and it bangs it all out, centered or justified if you like. The memory also enables an erasing feature if you have the proper cartridges, which I don't. I prefer it to a computer for a couple of reasons. You instantly have hard copies of every page. The obnoxious clicky-clack keys and panicked smashing down of the hammer for each character carries a sense of commitment, as does the inability to backspace and revise. You learn to just run with it. Just type everything and worry about deleting crap bits or rearranging words later. It's liberating. There's also the lack of distractions. It's a solitary experience, there's no Facebook button, but it's also much easier to step away and interact with actual human's physically in the room with you. You can turn it off and on and resume exactly where you left off instantly. There are downsides, obviously. There are no cloud-based backups and research must be done on some other device. Afterwards you have to find a stack scanner to digitise all the pages, and hope that the software accurately recognises the characters on the page (it won't) so you can edit on a computer. The cartridges don't last long and are hard to come by.
In the past year I've also started a Facebook page and a Twitter, and connected the Instagram account to both, so it's becoming an interlinked spiderweb of social networking platforms, which is I think how social network marketing is supposed to work? I guess?
Na(tional)No(vel)Wri(ting)Mo(nth) is happening. I'm not participating in that. I don't intend to finish the one I'm currently working on within the next three weeks, and I started it well before November so I guess it doesn't count anyway. Like Movember, you've got to start afresh, right? So I'm currently living in Seattle, a legal resident of the US. In a little bit I'll put up a thing on here about my employment experiences in Vancouver, that might be a bit interesting.
Peace.
