Home and Exhausted
Assignments and Email Tomorrow…
Long two-day drive from the Oregon Coast to Las Vegas. I had forgotten just how long, actually. But great to be home.
Last twenty hours of Cold Poker Gang Kickstarter. And we are nearing the next stretch goal which adds another free book for everyone plus a choice of Pop-Up Writing Class worth $150. So sure hope we can make that. It would be very cool.
And thank you, everyone, for the support of my series. Means a great deal.
And one blast to the past. One of my most famous short stories, a story I have made over $20,000 on and counting is called “In the Shade of the Slowboat Man.”
I wrote it in about three hours one afternoon at a writer’s retreat on the Oregon Coast when Kris and I still lived in Eugene.
Found a picture, weirdly enough, of me in the process of writing that short story, more than likely taken by Nina Kiriki Hoffman.
And yes, it was on a typewriter. And yes, I used to have a mullet with long, dark hair. It was the 1980s.
6 Comments
Diane Mills
Glad you are home safe. Nice typewriter, too.
Harvey Stanbrough
Great pic, Dean. Do you remember what the typewriter was?
dwsmith
Not a clue. I was wondering the same thing when I saw it. I did a lot of typing over the years on an IBM but that typewriter in the picture I remember having for a few years before finally moving to a computer in 1988 or so.
Jason M
It might be an IBM Selectric. My family had one in the 80s; I remember using it in high school and for my college applications. It was retired shortly thereafter.
dwsmith
Nope, I used a Selectric for years. And gave one away last week. Not that.
Kate Pavelle
LOL, Dean, did you hunt-and-peck? My dad used to do that, but it didn’t slow him down any. He wrote some fun fiction and close to two hundred patent applications that way, and that’s not counting related documentation. When he saw me copy a document by reading *while* typing, he was so amazed, as though it was an incredible circus trick.
I learned to touch-type in high school in what I thought would be a blow-off class. I was the worst, the slowest and the sloppiest. Mrs. Migliore had asked my why I don’t put more effort into it, and I had said, in my 16-year old wisdom, “I’ll be a research scientist and I won’t need to type – I’ll have a secretary anyway.”
Let’s just say, I’ve named a character in my old typing teacher’s honor. Who would’ve thought keyboards would permeate our life?
Few decades later, and I never want my stories to be considered “skilled typing.”
(It was, likewise, the 80’s 😉 )