Tech Curses, Etc.

Been receiving some good tech/publishing ideas from a couple of readers. Thanks gentlemen. Anything you do to help the bumbling technophobe here is appreciated.

The first computer I ever owned was a Kaypro 2000 laptop. It was ancient when I bought it. It had a 3"x8" display screen about the size of the blogger text box I'm typing into now. I never figured out how the damn thing worked, to be honest. Somehow it stored and replicated info on one disk, I think. Could it have not had a hard drive? Goodness, just thinking about it blogs my mind. I think I spent more time wrangling with the tech than writing with the damn thing. I may have wrote a couple of plays on it before I finally gave it away. I took a little bath in the deal, having paid three-hundred for it. I turned it over to a friend before I threw it out my front window and into the street. I'd venture to say the computer was fine. I just couldn't remember how to use it from day to day. Typical of my every endeavor. Seriously, I have memory problems. Have since Jr. High. Wait, now I remember! It had a program disk...How'd that work...Hmmmm

Laptops have come up in the world since then, I'd say. Around the same time I owned the Kaypro, I found a Radio Shack laptop that worked off double-A batteries and had an even smaller display screen. I liked the Radio Shack model more than the Kaypro, though its memory was tiny in comparison. I could save about eight pages of single-spaced text in the RS laptop, so if I wanted to write a long piece I'd print out a couple of copies, delete the printed text and continue on with a new section of writing.

Before long I learned to just shorten up everything. I wrote a few short stories, holding them to eight pages or fewer, sort of experimenting with story length and brevity, trying to make something work. Not much did I'm afraid. I tossed most of those stories years ago.

I was thinking about output the other day as I wrote about Bernard Malamud. He wrote eight novels, not a terribly large number for a bestselling author. Most writers want to cash in on their fame and pump out as much as they can while the iron is hot. Malamud also wrote a handful of short story collections. He had trouble pleasing himself and took a long time making things sound right with his novels and stories. He rewrote a lot, many drafts, so it's not as if he wasn't working. He was seeking a sense of perfection, you might guess. Along with his teaching duties, the novels and stories absorbed all his time and he managed to produce very good literature, which is not something every prolific author can claim.

I'm not sure what this post has been about. Sort of a ramble, uh?


TS