Hello, hello. I didn’t get to work on the story on the bus ride in to work but I’ve decided to skip the Christmas cards and work on my writing instead.
I’ve been having a string of good luck with the good old fashioned pen and paper. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m slower at writing than typing so it forces me to rein in my thoughts or whether it’s the mechanical activity of actually using penmanship/sloppy printing. There’s something magical about the writing process. I’m not sure if it satisfies the primitive artist in me or if it’s just a welcome break from using a keyboard and staring at a monitor for hours at a time. It’s strangely comforting to sit down with a stack of blank pages and watch as they magically turn into page after page of my story. It is extremely gratifying to have an instant physical manifestation of my work in my hands at the end of the day.
I still haven’t gotten around to bringing in the goggles; I don’t know if they will ever appear. I assume so but I have no clue when. The story is progressing quite nicely, I was telling my Mom last night about the very first twist that appeared. It completely caught me off guard and I LOVED it. I wonder if most authors experience writing this way. I can’t really describe the process other than it’s like riding in a car at night without using headlights. I have a final destination in mind but along the way things happen that will probably set me off course. Maybe I’ll end up taking a detour and other times I’ll crash and burn but I do my best to stay on track and accommodate the surprises the best I can. It definitely makes for an interesting ride. That’s for sure!
12 Novels in 12 Months 
Writing by hand is a lot slower for me, too, but I found it’s still faster in the end. Maybe it’s the direct brain-hand connection, or the holistic act of writing words instead of typing letters and spaces – and of course it makes constant editing so much more difficult 😉
Maria, you’ve hit the nail on the head. If I misspell something, I just scratch it out and move on or don’t even realize a “there” slipped in where “their” is the right choice. I find I spend half my time on the computer either backtracking to fix a misspelled word or correcting spaces between words because it cut one in half (the classic one is “int he”). Otherwise, it’s correcting capital second letters whereas in penmanship, it’s a quirk and style. What is technically improper in print is charming and unique in hand written notes.
There is something extremely cathartic about hand writing. I’ll be doing it more often, I think!