The Irvania Blog

Here it is, well past the middle of 2008, and I find myself using an ancient bit of old and odd (for me, anyway) technology. I’m writing the original version of this post on a piece of paper. With a pen. Not some high tech pen that talks or makes phone calls or does something digitally, a ballpoint pen. With blue ink.

You long-time Irvania.com readers out there probably know that I’m no Luddite. I bought my first home computer in 1982, got my first workable word processing software in 1984, and haven’t looked back since. Well, okay, I look back all the time, but that’s another article.

After 24 years of using a word processor, it feels very strange to be using pen and paper again. It feels, well, unnatural. Sure, I use paper and pen or pencil all the time for scratching down notes or scribbling out paperwork at my job, but very rarely in the last 24 years have I done any real writing without involving a computer somehow.

When I was in the third grade — this is 1969 we’re talking about here — we were taught the proper way to write a paper: make a first draft using pencil, then revise a second and third draft in pen, then revise and rewrite a few more times, then by about the sixth or seventh revisions, start using a typewriter. Continue revising and rewriting, retyping every page from scratch each and every time. By the time you got to the thirteenth or fourteenth revision, you might have something presentable.

Even back then I thought that process sounded terribly obsolete.  I don’t know if it’s taught anymore.

The advent of the word processor, of course, made that entire concept redundant. You revise as you go, and if, like me, you’re paranoid about losing stuff, you make backup copies at various steps along the way. For instance, I have 49 different versions of the first chapter of my book saved, but there is no real “first draft.”

So anyway, here I am, putting pen to paper. After years of using Palm Pilot and other PDAs, various portable computers and laptops, I find myself in a place with some time to kill and nothing but a pen and some scratch paper available. My handwriting, never very good to begin with, has obviously deteriorated since 1984.

I feel that, somehow, technology has failed me. Or I failed techology. I’m not sure which. There’s gotta be some betrayal in there somewhere.

I was going to write a piece about all the lists I keep, and how much of my life is documented on one Excel spreadsheet or another, but I’m just not feeling it. Truthfully, I haven’t been in a blogging mood lately.

Oh, rest assured that the creative juices are flowing. I’ve been doing a lot of work on a new novel idea (a workplace comedy code-named Long Run) and on the second novel of the Generic Legions series and tinkering with several game designs, one of which I’ll be presenting at a big convention in Gettysburg this November. And rest assured that I’ve had lots of ideas for blog entries and have witnessed a good number of blog-worthy moments lately. It’s just that I haven’t felt like blogging.

The problem, blog-entry-or-lack-thereof-wise, is that life has been too good for me lately. My wife Hanna and our four dogs and I live in a nice little place in the middle of the woods, with hardly any neighbors within mortar range. We don’t have a lot, but we have each other. We have a lot of great books and a lot of great music CD’s and a hammock and enough bad movies (between a complete collection of MST3K episodes and those 50 Movie Pack sci fi DVD collections) to keep us busy for a long long time. I have a job that makes my feet hurt, but it’s a job, and these days that’s important.

We’ve been enjoying life. That’s all. We’ve been watching the hummingbirds and listening to the thrushes and sitting under the canopy in the rain and nibbling on the wild raspberries that grow in the woods and smelling all those plants I can’t remember the names of.

Typing in a blog entry just doesn’t seem very important when we have all that living to do. Sorry.