One…singular sensation

I started a JanNo on 1 January; I call it my WriMo, my Writing Month. The pages I have written in the last week are the first significant words I have written in four years. It seems so, so long ago. And yet, taking out the typewriter, cleaning it off, installing a new ribbon, it was like seeing an old friend again, but without

the uncomfortable silences lapsing into otherwise ribald conversation; not like saying hello, grabbing a cup of coffee, promising you’ll keep doing this and never do.I have renewed this friendship, welcomed it back into my life, held it to me and promised myself, not the friend, not some other but me, that I shall not let us go so long without speaking again. I shall keep this alive, keep the conversation going, and not be rebuffed when we have nothing to say to one another. What is a friend after all if not someone with whom one can have comfortable silences?

I’m using the Olivetti Lettera 25 my wife gave me before we got married. I don’t think I’ve ever written anything on it, though I did try when I first got it. It’s brand new–well, brand new for a manual typewriter. I don’t think other fingers have ever touched it. Which is a first for me. My typewriters have always been used models, ones I’ve found at garage and estate sales, the outcasts from another life. The Olivetti is mostly plastic; metal has been reserved for the inner parts. As a result, it is much lighter than my other typewriters (a Hermes 3000 and a Royal Portable) and because it’s newer (I’d guess from the 70s or 80s) the typeface is bigger. It bothered me at first, but I’m used to it now. In fact, the larger typeface allows me to go through pages faster; I feel even more productive than on either the Royal or the Hermes. I have a feeling editing will be a little easier on the eyes, too.

I’ve made a point in my JanNo posts about how the typewriter allows me to jail my inner editor during this first phase of the writing process. I have to keep the editor locked away so he doesn’t interrupt the flow of the words coming from my head. It would be like running an Olympic 100 meter sprint and having your coach stop you at the 50 meter line and tell you to run faster, keep your arms straight, your head high, lift your knees. At that point, if you’re not doing all the stuff you’ve been training for all this time, you’re not going to run your best race anyway. For me, if I let the editor out now, I may miss thoughts and words that otherwise the editor would snuff. “Don’t put that in,” he’d say. Or, “The phrasing on that last sentence is off; you should rework it.” To rework now, in the middle of the fun part of writing, the creative part, the simply writing part, would mean losing my train of thought, losing where I was headed (like I almost did when I turned writing into an italicized word). Keeping the editor at bay keeps my words flowing.

So far they’ve been flowing well. I scanned what I had written through yesterday into my computer at work today and discovered to my shock and thrill that I had written close to 13,000 words, rather than the 9,000 I had guestimated. Scanned and OCR’d it’s mostly a garbled mess (Adobe’s OCR doesn’t do well with the typewritten word) so though the words don’t make any sense, they are complete words, spaces in all the right places. That’s all that matters in word counts.

I’ve so enjoyed posting to the JanNo site that I’ve decided to create this cyber me. I’ll write here about what comes to my mind, things I find interesting, post some stories (once I get some of this JanNo edited), some videos or other stuff I find on the web, book reviews, comments on current events, whatever I deem interesting enough to post. Hopefully it’ll be a fun ride. I hope you enjoy taking it with me.