A blank look and a sharp sarcastic eye
Jul. 27th, 2015 10:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperancePeople. You know how I'm always telling you that I'm a minimalist at heart, if only I wasn't also a hoarder?
Well, look at this pretty thing. I had to clean off all my desk in tribute, the wood swept as clear as the keys:
Why yes, it really is entirely blank of key. And clicky.
I've been typing for, um. Forty-two years now. I taught myself one Easter holiday, on a mechanical typewriter, the big office Imperial my sister had borrowed from a friend of our mother's. It was a rare case of doing the groundwork against a future need: I was going to be a writer, and therefore I should know how to type, and that was worth three weeks' investment.
I didn't need to touch-type, though. I was going to be a writer, not a copy-typist; everything would be new, original creation, so I could look at the keyboard as much as I liked.*
So I learned to type, and banked the skill; and a couple of years later acquired a portable typewriter, and wrote stories and poetry and plays alongside school essays, and started novels I could never finish, and like that. Somewhere in there, I touch-typed my first word, entirely by accident; it was "the", and it just happened. I was looking at the paper, reading what I'd just typed and working out what came next, and my fingers simply did what my mind foresaw. It was like magic; I was enchanted.
And then I sold my first stories, and started to build a career in parallel with a life; and bought a secondhand electric typewriter. It was never beautiful, but it did what I needed for a couple of years and would have gone on a lot longer if I hadn't walked past a typewriter shop in town and glanced through the window and fallen in love.
I had never seen such a thing. It was vast and angular and black, more like a spaceship console than a typewriter; and it was electronic, which was clearly a vastly superior thing; and it had a one-line screen so that you could see what you'd typed before committing it to paper. And it would do centring and right-justifying and all sorts of fancy stuff. And it cost six hundred quid (as against its list price of twelve hundred, so it was a bargain as well as being the most expensive thing I'd ever dreamed of buying), and thus the first (and not the last) opportunity for a bank manager to suck air through his teeth and shake his head and say "On paper, you're a very bad risk, but..."
I finished my first novels on that machine, the commissioned pseudonymous romantic thriller that I wrote in three weeks flat and the serious Chaz Brenchley thriller that took me four years to write and then rewrite before it sold. And then it did sell; and practically my first act after that was to give the bank manager another chance to laugh, before he lent me three grand for my first computer.
Which was an Apricot, and lovely, and its keyboard was only marginally a let-down after the vast Olivetti. The Apricot was stolen three years later, and I bought a Dell; the keyboard was a marginal disappointment after the Apricot, but hey. Compatibility was a great compensation.
And then there was the Gateway, and then another Dell, and and and. And the RSI grew so bad I needed an ergonomic keyboard, and I wanted the Maltron I couldn't afford, and bought Microsoft instead; and I've been through, I don't know, four or five MS Naturals. The cats have killed a couple, and a couple have just died, and I've always just gone back and bought another because they're easy to find and I'm used to them and they do help. And it amuses me to type on something that other people can't use. Despite being a creature of habit, I do have this apparent ability to swap muscle-memory mindmaps of key positions, almost without hesitation; I use a laptop in the library and the desktop here at home, and never worry either way. But of course I never liked the touch of a membrane keyboard, after growing up with mechanical switches; and now - well. Now I have Das Keyboard.
It's not ergonomic (tho' maybe that will come?). What it is, it's heavy on the desk and light under the fingers, it's charmingly clicky and ridiculously cool to look at, an expression of sheer arrogance, "What's that you say? Letters on the keys? Why on earth...?" And it took me about two minutes actually to get used to that, to learn that I do glance down for some key-combinations (HTML commands and the like) but that I don't really need to; and already I am loving this thing. If it's true that a clear desk aids creativity, maybe it's true of a clear keyboard too. If not, pfft. This is worth having just for the fun of it. It makes me grin, and want to type some more.
*Bless my heart.
Well, look at this pretty thing. I had to clean off all my desk in tribute, the wood swept as clear as the keys:
Why yes, it really is entirely blank of key. And clicky.
I've been typing for, um. Forty-two years now. I taught myself one Easter holiday, on a mechanical typewriter, the big office Imperial my sister had borrowed from a friend of our mother's. It was a rare case of doing the groundwork against a future need: I was going to be a writer, and therefore I should know how to type, and that was worth three weeks' investment.
I didn't need to touch-type, though. I was going to be a writer, not a copy-typist; everything would be new, original creation, so I could look at the keyboard as much as I liked.*
So I learned to type, and banked the skill; and a couple of years later acquired a portable typewriter, and wrote stories and poetry and plays alongside school essays, and started novels I could never finish, and like that. Somewhere in there, I touch-typed my first word, entirely by accident; it was "the", and it just happened. I was looking at the paper, reading what I'd just typed and working out what came next, and my fingers simply did what my mind foresaw. It was like magic; I was enchanted.
And then I sold my first stories, and started to build a career in parallel with a life; and bought a secondhand electric typewriter. It was never beautiful, but it did what I needed for a couple of years and would have gone on a lot longer if I hadn't walked past a typewriter shop in town and glanced through the window and fallen in love.
I had never seen such a thing. It was vast and angular and black, more like a spaceship console than a typewriter; and it was electronic, which was clearly a vastly superior thing; and it had a one-line screen so that you could see what you'd typed before committing it to paper. And it would do centring and right-justifying and all sorts of fancy stuff. And it cost six hundred quid (as against its list price of twelve hundred, so it was a bargain as well as being the most expensive thing I'd ever dreamed of buying), and thus the first (and not the last) opportunity for a bank manager to suck air through his teeth and shake his head and say "On paper, you're a very bad risk, but..."
I finished my first novels on that machine, the commissioned pseudonymous romantic thriller that I wrote in three weeks flat and the serious Chaz Brenchley thriller that took me four years to write and then rewrite before it sold. And then it did sell; and practically my first act after that was to give the bank manager another chance to laugh, before he lent me three grand for my first computer.
Which was an Apricot, and lovely, and its keyboard was only marginally a let-down after the vast Olivetti. The Apricot was stolen three years later, and I bought a Dell; the keyboard was a marginal disappointment after the Apricot, but hey. Compatibility was a great compensation.
And then there was the Gateway, and then another Dell, and and and. And the RSI grew so bad I needed an ergonomic keyboard, and I wanted the Maltron I couldn't afford, and bought Microsoft instead; and I've been through, I don't know, four or five MS Naturals. The cats have killed a couple, and a couple have just died, and I've always just gone back and bought another because they're easy to find and I'm used to them and they do help. And it amuses me to type on something that other people can't use. Despite being a creature of habit, I do have this apparent ability to swap muscle-memory mindmaps of key positions, almost without hesitation; I use a laptop in the library and the desktop here at home, and never worry either way. But of course I never liked the touch of a membrane keyboard, after growing up with mechanical switches; and now - well. Now I have Das Keyboard.
It's not ergonomic (tho' maybe that will come?). What it is, it's heavy on the desk and light under the fingers, it's charmingly clicky and ridiculously cool to look at, an expression of sheer arrogance, "What's that you say? Letters on the keys? Why on earth...?" And it took me about two minutes actually to get used to that, to learn that I do glance down for some key-combinations (HTML commands and the like) but that I don't really need to; and already I am loving this thing. If it's true that a clear desk aids creativity, maybe it's true of a clear keyboard too. If not, pfft. This is worth having just for the fun of it. It makes me grin, and want to type some more.
*Bless my heart.