How I Write (the nitty gritty)

This is not a craft post. It’s a lovely story of a girl and her pen.

In the comments section of yesterday’s post:
Do you have a dedicated non-internet computer? or even better a dedicated writing room?

Uh, no and no. I have one computer, named Pantalaimon. I bought it after my last iBook, Lancelot, went on its final quest. I also bought a nifty backup drive. You can read the whole saga here and here. Sometimes we think about buying a new computer, but I think if we did, it would quickly turn into a World of Warcraft machine.

My dedicated non-internet computer is known in the vernacular as a spiral-bound notebook. I keep it in my purse. It’s handy for jotting down directions and grocery lists as well as books. If you don’t have a purse, I’ve heard a briefcase works just as well.

I used to have an Alphasmart, but it got hit by a car in an underground parking garage in a shady section of Sydney, and it’s never been the same since. It had been a rather scrappy little thing, having survived several months in the Australian outback before being temporarily undone by a splash of chocolate milk and some giant carpenter ants (long story). We got it fixed by taking three buses out of Auckland to a random suburb where the only Alphasmart repairman in the south Pacific took one look at our sunburned faces, windswept hair, and giant backpacks, and realized that we must need this keyboard desperately. He switched out the keyboards, and after that, it worked fine until I was run down — on purpose, mind you — by mid-80s-era ford Falcon station wagon in that parking garage. Alpha took the bullet for me.

As for a dedicated writing room, Sailor Boy is cracking up right now. You see, when we were shopping for apartments, I was all about getting someplace with a study, or at least a walk in closet that I could use for a study. So we did and I put my desk in there and that’s the last I’ve seen of it. Because you know what else closets are really great for? Storing stuff. I work on the couch. Or at the dining room table. Or in my bedroom. Or at the coffee shop down the street. Or sometimes on the metro. Or in the tea shop near my old office. Once I tried working at the Border’s Cafe but I ended up spending 50 bucks on books, so now I avoid that.

My point is that a side effect of living in a tent the size of a coffee table for six months with someone bigger than you is that you lose all privacy requirements when it comes to working. I wrote in the tent and wasn’t distracted when it was attacked by kangaroos. I wrote in internet cafes blaring techno music while high school gamer boys yelled back and forth from their machines. I learned how to make space in my head when there was none around me.

The one downside to not having an office is that I don’t really have a dedicated place for paperwork. All the stuff on my computer is organized into folders. I bought a real filing cabinet for the paperwork, but it’s still sitting in pieces in the closet-that-should-be-my-office.