It is a ridiculous, petty, affluent-first-world problem: and yet, my life is better when the computer isn’t broken. My most productive, smartest place to write fiction* is out-amongst, where I can hear the sounds of people swirling together in a mass: voices and laughs and indistinguishable sursurrations. So when my trusty computador Sancho became far less trusty several weeks ago – and had to be sent to reform school – I was stuck with the much slower pen-and-paper.
And by much slower, I mean by a factor of hell-frozen molasses. Slower than snails grow legs. Slower than jujubes melt in a toothless mouth, and slower than a brontosaurus who survived long enough to take quaaludes in the 70s, after taking the quaaludes. Hyperbolically slow.
Which is not to say that writing by hand doesn’t have its place. (To some extent, I just like hyperbole.) But my fingers record words more than twice as quickly, making it so the story doesn’t drag on past the point I’m interested in it. I get bored too quickly! And if I’m writing a scene that i’m sick of… it’s a problem for that scene.
I am so glad to have back my lovely computador. NaNoWriMo ’08, here we come!
* People-noise is good for writing fiction, but for nonfiction, I’ve been listening to classical pieces (Hindemith, Adams, Mahler, Holst, + many more) on Pandora, in a station called “Torreybird’s Concentrating.”
Torreybird 
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