This year

After years and years of saying, "I want to be a writer!" in a stubborn, hopeful voice, I've decided (or maybe just noticed) that this is the year I sit down and do it.

I am two scenes down on a story called "Missing 9xxxx." I plan to be four scenes down by the weekend.

Ha!

After years of telling myself I just didn't have the right tools (laptop, perfect fountain pen, perfect ballpoint, perfect notebook, no, the other perfect notebook), I have settled down with a fully manual 1930s portable typewriter that is pleasingly noisy when I bang on the keys and pleasingly silent when I don't. More importantly, it bears no relationship to the computer I bang on for hours each day at work. It has no glimmering screen, and no mouse. And as such, it doesn't aggravate my tech-unhappy wrists. There's this to be said for doing it the hard way: muscles are designed to take abuse; tendons aren't.

Of course, there's the interesting fact that there's no way to back up, erase, or otherwise edit. Which is why I dumped four pages of manuscript into the recycling bin last night: each one of them bore a single sentence that just didn't work.

How pretentious is that? A single sentence.

But still . . . I'm finally doing it.

Again: ha!