Now and Then

I’m sitting at the breakfast bar with my laptop as I write this. Normally, I write in my office ten steps from my kitchen where I enjoy a view of the Times Square area in New York City from the 29th floor of my condo building. On days when the light pours in through the floor-the-ceiling window, I lower the shade to block the sun’s glare. I switch on the radiant heating screen under my desk on cold days. I think of it as my writing nest. It’s like a bird’s nest except it’s woven of the books, knickknacks, photos, and mementos that line its walls instead of twigs and stems.

I didn’t always have an office. In the early days of my writing career, my writing desk sat in a corner of my kitchen. I wrote on a manual typewriter. I churned out dozens of articles, short stories, and two novels the old-fashioned way, which seems inconceivable to me now. Before there was the cut-and-paste function there was literal cutting and pasting using scissors and tape. Before there were keyboards and LED screens there were keys and typewriter ribbons. Editing was done with a red pencil rather than an edit function. I remember how excited I was when I upgraded from my old Corona to an electric typewriter. I imagine my forbears felt similarly when they upgraded from horse and buggy to motorcar.

The first novel I wrote on my manual typewriter was a gothic romance. It remains unpublished to this day, with good reason. It was pretty awful. I don’t know if it even still physically exists in manuscript form. I’d have to do a deep dive into my boxes of old stuff and manuscripts to find it. One of these days I might get around to it. It’d be good for a laugh, or to use as an example to illustrate how the early writings of most authors are mostly pretty rough, and at worst, sophomoric. In my gothic romance, one of the characters dies from inhaling smoke from burning poison oak. I don’t know if that’s even possible! All I can say is it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I fired my first agent after I got a letter from her in which she stated the reason she hadn’t responded to any of my inquiries in the months prior was because her typewriter had been jammed by a chunk of ceiling plaster that had fallen into it. Why it took her months to get her typewriter fixed or replaced, and why she couldn’t pick up a phone, I couldn’t say. I think we can file her excuse in the folder labeled “The Dog Ate My Homework and Other Lame Excuses.”

When I upgraded to a PC, it was an early model that would seem antediluvian today. Back then it was state of the art. I was also a techie newbie, so it matched my skill level. The Internet was in its infancy then. I remember Googling stuff before there was Google and having three of four links pop up in my browser instead of dozens or hundreds for any given name or topic. I wrote my first book that was published in hardcover, Garden of Lies, on my first PC. It was before I owned a laptop.

These days I’m happy to own a laptop that goes where I go and fits comfortably in my carryon bag when I travel. I like that it allows me to enjoy different views when I write at home. Right now I’m looking at the fridge and row of cupboards across from the breakfast bar. It has me thinking about cooking lunch. I plan to make a chicken dish using the package of frozen chicken thighs currently thawing on the counter. I’ll post a pic of it on Instagram after it’s done so you can see how it turned out.