The Old Man and the Obsolescency…

So I’ve always marveled at hearing of writers out there who stubbornly still used typewriters for their work. Harlan Ellison (RIP) was notorious for this, as far as I know still cranking away at one of them until the day he died. I believe he’d also give an earful to anyone who asked, ranting about how sloppy today’s writers were with their newfangled tech that allowed them to go back and edit whatever they barfed out — get it right the first time, dangit! Which ignores the reality that a perfect first draft is by and large a thing of myth. I think Ellison would just say to write it all out again.

Anyhow… surprise, surprise, I use a computer. And yet my fancy word processing software of choice is Microsoft Word.

Microsoft Word 2003.

It ain’t broke so I ain’t feeling no need to upgrade (dangit!). It does what I need it to, I know where all the menu functions are, and frankly writing just sometimes is difficult enough without your composition tools getting in the way. Is there stuff out there that’s specifically designed for scriptwriting and organizing world-building, etc.? You bet. Do I want to spend time learning how to use those as opposed to continuing to write? Nossir.

I believe this is not as irrational as my own ongoing confusion over those who would keep using a manual typewriter once computers and word processors became ubiquitous. I spent the early years of my life (including much of my schooling) having to hand write or use a typewriter and it was terrible. God I even remember getting one of those “correction” typewriters that would basically slap a measured dose of white out on the paper as a primitive form of “undo” — which was better than having to paint the white out on by hand but still messy, and you were shit out of luck if you wanted to do something like change the order of paragraphs. Now admittedly the early word processors were clunky as heck and an IBM/x86 dude like me lacked mouse functionality so the Mac users laughed heartily, and inkjet and laser printers were the toys of the rich and no professor was going to accept a book report off the fixed-width dot matrix monstrosity available to the common student.

Ugh. Peers have learned to never reminisce with me about the “good old days” because I’ll happily remind them of how rose-colored their glasses are.

But yeah, I still use a 15+ year old version of MS Word and it’s entirely possible that’s it’s own kind of insanity. Dawn keeps trying to get me to do my scripts on Google Drive so they’re on the cloud, and part of me recognizes that would be a good idea but the other part snarls and huddles away and still has a first instinct to bounce scripts between computers via email or network sharing rather than this newfangled cloud business the damn kids are all into. WordPress recently updated the way these very blogs are written and after struggling with the new format for awhile I hunted down a way to change it back.

I wonder if Harlan Ellison thought people still writing things by hand was crazy? And then there was my grade school teacher insisting we spend all that time learning cursive because it would be essential to our adult lives.

Meh, these days I’m a dog getting old but occasionally can be lured into a new trick, like when Dawn finally got me to invest in a wireless router for our apartment which I now admit I was foolish to hesitate in adopting. We’ll see.