Alethea Williams
This post
by Alethea Williams
When I first started writing, my desk was my kitchen table and my tools were one of my kids’ leftover lined notebooks that were four for a dollar at the back-to-school sale, and a Bic pen that couldn’t have cost more than that. I wrote longhand for many years.
Old and New
My first word processor cost $200,at that time a lot of money to me. It had no hard drive and stored everything on big floppy discs.
It soon developed an electrical short and ate up all my work.I had a Commodore computer for a while. I think these computers had 256k of memory. Commodores had a sort of cult following, with users writing programs that were published in a magazine for others to copy. It seemed like a toy to me. It was a gift from my dad, and when I got rid of it, it still looked brand-new because I never used it.
Commodore
I went to a DOS-based computer, expensive in those days, and again started saving my work to disc. I had a manual of DOS commands – that still comes in handy sometimes, although I have the feeling Microsoft would rather its casual users didn’t know too much about messing around with a computer’s operating system. I don’t remember how much memory this computer had but it wasn’t much. And I had a dot-matrix printer which I heard a lot of moaning about from editors at conferences who had to struggle to read those submissions. Ah, the good old days, when editors actually accepted unsolicited submissions!
Computers kept getting faster and cheaper, with more memory. I got my first laser printer, which turned out beautiful manuscripts on 20-lb. bond paper. Still, the rejections came in. I couldn’t understand it. Wasn’t I doing everything right? I was certainly spending a lot of money on tools for writing.
My latest computer is an all-in-one with cordless keyboard and mouse. Goodbye tangles of wires, hello inability to stay connected to the downstairs modem, so yesterday I had to go buy a range extender. I compose directly to the computer nowadays, and I save my work to a thumb drive. No more yearly purchase of a thick guide to editors and agents, all that information is available online.
Submissions are sent as an e-mail attachment, so no more paper, printer, or postage expense. Publishing is a self-serve option now, with Lulu and Book Baby and CreateSpace. Some of the bigger publishers offering do it yourself book services. And promotion is almost entirely online although I’ve seen some authors lately having postcards printed to be sent out announcing their book signings. The novelty of using slow, old-time advertising is getting them noticed.
The “business” of writing has changed so much. There might still be pen-and-paper writers out there, but I don’t personally know of any. How about you? How dependent are you on your computer for your writing? Do you think technology has made you a better writer?
I did get published, thanks! You can get a copy of my award winning novel Willow Vale from: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or the publisher. Follow me on Facebook, and Twitter at @actuallyalethea. Read my personal blog at Actually Alethea.
Keira's Place 