30 Days of Fanfic: Day 27

[john_amend_all]

27) Where is your favourite place to write, and do you write by hand or on the computer?

I'm afraid I have no pictures of notebooks to match liadtbunny's; I was taught to type at the age of ten, and have preferred keyboards to handwriting ever since. Consequently, I do all my writing on the computer, and most of that in my 'office' [spare bedroom] at home. I've tried various portable machines, but anything less than a full-sized keyboard (preferably a clicky IBM Model M) tends to get in between me and whatever it is I'm trying to write.

Exceptions are rare enough that I can remember a couple: Six-odd years ago, during a tedious train journey, I wrote the opening scene of a fic on an old HP200LX palmtop. And a lot of the drabbles in 22 Pairs were written on a netbook while I was on holiday in North Yorkshire; though, even then, I brought a separate full-sized keyboard with me rather than use the cut-down one built into the netbook.

My other quirk when writing is that I use a text editor (usually gVim) rather than any form of word processor. That's because, for me, fanfic was originally associated with USENET, and so I wrote it as I would any other USENET post. Even today, I still tend to write using the USENET idioms for *bold* and /italics/, and then go through at the last minute replacing them with the appropriate HTML markup for LJ / DWth / Teaspoon / AO3.

This entry was originally posted at http://john-amend-all.dreamwidth.org/95382.html. Feel free to comment there or here.

Comments

[liadt]

Ten! Were you brought up in a secretary workhouse? I think I should've been taught to type at the age of ten. I am amused by you dragging a full sized keyboard on hols - take that shrinking technology!

[john_amend_all]

Heh, no. It was an optional course at the prep school which I attended. I wonder if the original intention was to give female pupils a head start on becoming the next generation of secretaries; if so, I suspect the advance of technology may have caused a few changes in that plan.