Yeah, I did learn to type on a typewriter... nostalgia... le sigh.
Those were the days when I learned that I preferred editing on a computer or turning in a report for school in crayon, which I did my senior year in high school, but I got my teacher's permission first.
Anyway, before this blog post becomes a journey of it's own, I'll just get on with what I wanted to talk about today: Computers.
As you may have guessed, in seventeen years, I've gone through a couple different computers. I started off with a Dell I used through college and it was an absolute workhorse. In fact, I still have it somewhere, though we haven't fired it up in years. Since I haven't mentioned fire once yet, now is the time. That computer caught fire when we had a neutral surge through the house. Only the power supply burned up and my husband (Jason) replaced that and the computer kept on working. That's the first lesson in backing things up. You can put a disk in another computer, but you can't guarantee getting data back from a broken hard drive. My first version of back up was hard copy. When I only had a couple stories going, hard copy made sense for editing and backing things up...
And yes, my disk I meant floppy disc. It was seventeen years ago. That was my first computer when I got married and I didn't get a laptop for about three years. When I did get that one, it was my very first and HUGE. I mean, HUGE and HEAVY. Still, I could write on the couch. Of course, I wrote while sitting on the couch before that, but all longhand.
Eventually, that computer got outdated and we got a desktop for the family, but also, something much cooler happened, I got a smart phone. I wrote most of my first Middle Grade book on that smart phone because we were never home. If only that first smartphone had ever managed to send my email. I could only check it on there and it got difficult to transfer files from where I was to where I wanted them on the big computer. Also, this is the answer to why I have an iphone. Android didn't do what I needed it to do on the most basic of levels. The whole time, I coveted a tablet that would work like a laptop, but would really be a lot more like my ipod touch, only a lot bigger. Enter the three years of muttering about wishing I could get an ipad. Guys, I wanted one from the very start. And wow does this all come out sounding whiny and first world problems. I fully admit that is what I had. I worked full time, had two kids, and was really trying to write professionally and query agents at that point, all from my not so smart phone. Typing 50,000 words on a phone is one thing, but editing, come on. I needed something portable and a laptop was way beyond the budget.
I'm still not sure if my husband was tired of seeing me type on my phone, hearing me whine, or it was simply the prevailing wage job that came right near my birthday, but I moved up in the world that birthday a "few" years ago when I opened what I thought was a book, but was my ipad, which I still write on today.
Around when the kids started using the computer, I got a laptop again, that one died two weeks ago and I type this on my new one. This hasn't been a hugely exciting blog post, but it's part of my journey and there is so much waiting and boringness in the journey, you guys were bound to read one that wasn't terribly exciting, but I did manage to inlude fire, so yeah.