What I’m writing on

While I’m in a little down period between the two drafts (I’m letting things simmer), I figured I should backtrack a little.

I started writing the book on the main household computer. It has internet access, lots of games, and is in a room full of distractions. I knew early on that it wasn’t ideal. So when I picked up a new monitor for the computer I took the old one upstairs and hooked up my now nearly ten year old computer to it.

And it still worked. It’s a little slow, but I’m not sure if that is due to its tiredness or that I am now used to faster computers. At one point it was blazing.

But I went through and stripped down the whole machine. No games, no old files, nothing that could launch me down some “remember when” gushy fests. That memory-lane, for me, can eat up an hour faster than computer solitare can. The only thing that sits on the computer are mp3s and the documents where the book is contained.

I’m writing it all in a rich text format. It allows for all the font changes I need, but keeps the file sizes small enough to fit onto a 3.5″ disk. Plus it allows me to use a basic text editor. No spell or grammer checks. No word counts. Only me and the keyboard.

The computer has two hard-drives. I make a backup copy after each writing session. Every few days I then put a copy on a floppy disk.

The computer is in the art room / seldomly used guest bedroom. Its on the second floor which is pretty quiet. I have a few books and pictures and such to thumb through if I need to get into a calmer mood in which to write. I also havea a portable DVD player there, but I have found that watching movies is too much of a distraction while writing. So I will only listen to music, which I find to be a nice background noise.

The writing sessions vary in length from thirty minutes to maybe four or six hours. More than two hours is a rare occurance. I usually don’t have that much time to devote in a day to writing and I usually find something else to dsitract me in the room.

It looks like there will be no snazzy ending here