Tag: process

Gravity, Drafts, etc…

August 19th, 2023

I’m not as distractible as I made myself sound up there. I decided to embellish a little for the sake of the post. Mostly by accident, because once I had written that, the options were either to immediately explain it away, run with it a little, or grab an entirely new sheet of paper. One sounded too wasteful and the other struck me as just an awful way to write. I chose to run with it a little.

The bits about the typewriter really working in to my process and facilitating a lot of work, though, are true. I really started off exploring the machines to see if there was any value at all in this era of ubiquitous computers. It was kicked off by a book, The Typewriter Revolution, and I decided to see if I might be able to maintain a blog with various goals in mind. It turns out that writing is writing, and I’ve been slowly expanding what I work on. These are exciting times.

Technically, I’m displeased by some of the sentence structure and word choice in the typewritten document up there. Can’t change it now – it’s inked! Maybe some of these will be rewritten as actual text posts at some point in the future and I’ll have all the editing capacity I desire at that time.
Limited in All the Right Ways

August 4th, 2023

As you can see from the above text, sometimes mistakes are part of the process. Those are things that I’d just edit out, obviously, in any other medium for presentation. However, I just don’t want to. If I ever transcribe these posts into some other medium, I’ll go over them and fix ’em then. It’s not that they don’t bother me, it’s just that I’d go through a lot of paper.

Also, I’m probably not using correction fluid. That feels like a bridge too far for posts such as these.

On a typewriter technical note, I find that the rollers in the Quiet DeLuxe don’t have nearly as much trouble grabbing that sheet. It was a slightly lighter weight than I’d been using and it seems to have made a tremendous difference. Since we’re discussing how tools influence your process, I’ll state that my process involved a lot less fiddling with the paper and trying to get it to be properly aligned. That was a pleasant experience.
The Initial Hurdle

July 29th, 2023

I figured I’d write about this instead of what I was going to write about tonight. Mostly because I experienced the exact situation that I describe above where I decided my initial idea had too many holes in it to make a good post.

Generally, I’m uncomfortable with the idea that I have anything useful to say in the first place. I don’t want to spend effort and put things online if I don’t actually use that effort to say something useful. It’s very much a “who am I to say such things?” question I pose to myself. I suppose that’s the second hurdle and it’ll be coming out in typewritten form tomorrow.

The answer to that, by the way, is probably best phrased as “who cares?” It’s unlikely that I will develop anything useful to say by not practicing.

In a technical note, I one of the rollers on the typewriter I used for this doesn’t like gripping this paper very much. You can see the effect of that a little where the thing decided to almost mash one line into another in the second paragraph. It eventually got its act together and the rest of the document is actually relatively well-aligned. If it wasn’t for trying to overcome those quirks, I don’t think this would be half as fun as it is.
To Play the Guitar

July 27th, 2023

Further thoughts along the same line as an earlier post. I just realized that I didn’t specify that these guitar lessons were jazz lessons. I figure it’s a little important to the narrative I was trying to build because that tends to be a bit more demanding, in terms of what you need to execute on your instrument, than singer/songwriter stuff. That difficulty caused some serious overthinking, which was ameliorated by the thought “to play the guitar, you have to play the guitar.” But since I have the benefit of text formatting down here, I’ll say it thusly:

To play the guitar, you have to play the guitar. The gist of it was that there isn’t anything that you should do that you aren’t doing anyway – just play the instrument as best you can and keep learning. This holds for solo work and ensemble work. I assume the mindset holds for most things you can get up to unless it’s like, surgery or something. That has a high enough margin for error that you maybe shouldn’t take my advice for that.

Also, I’m noticing that the typeface of that typewriter doesn’t really play so well on a screen. It looks great on paper. The machine in question (a Lettera 22) is really fun to work with but I might not use it as much if it produces stuff that’s difficult to read. It did make the phrase “stuck in a rut” look a lot like “stuck in a rat” which is kind of funny and also a rough predicament.

Don’t get stuck in a rat, if you can help it.
Doing the Thing

June 23rd, 2023

It took me a while to get this update out because I was without a good, dedicated writing space and couldn’t be bothered to set one up with various other projects that were taking place.

This is the first post that touches on what I was intending to do with this blog in that I just want practice with sending my work somewhere. I want to grow accustomed to the idea that this stuff is available to be seen. Sometimes it’s not a comfortable thought.

Also, excitingly, I think I’ve devised a method by which I can finally fix the tilted text. When I saw what I could do, it made me feel like an idiot for not realizing it sooner. Then again, I didn’t grow up working with typewriters so maybe I have to rediscover some techniques on my own.
I Tried to Use A Word Processor

April 17th, 2023

Of course I still know how to use a word processor to just get something done. But I thought reporting on the result of this little experiment had some merit.

We can use the abstracted idea of the page to type a bunch of stuff out and get work done that way but it doesn’t mean that it’s the best fit for all situations. I think examining the manner in which we work has significant value.
Focusing Machine

March 30th, 2023

I feel like I’m getting the hang of making fewer errors. It requires more concentration than I’m used to bringing to bear to be able to pull that off. A few mistakes still aren’t preventing me from publishing! Mostly I don’t want to use a ton of paper to get something just right.

I’m thinking about maybe setting up to stream some typing work on Twitch, somehow or another. I envision it as kind of a place to hang out and maybe enjoy the (admittedly quaint) sound of a typewriter going to work on the page. I’m not fully sold on the idea yet, though.
Choosing Your Technology

March 28th, 2023

I feel like this one is slightly less slanted? I’m making progress with this weird little workflow.

For those interested, this was produced on a Royal Quiet DeLuxe from, near as I can tell, sometime in the late 40s. I might be wrong about that!

Anyway, we’re beginning to wander away from using the typewriter to discuss the typewriter, which will be ideal. I’m not into the idea of endlessly navel-gazing about the tool that produces the work. I’m working from some procession of ideas that make sense to me, though, and I just have to get some of this out of the way, first.