as for why hand-written pages, well, hand-writing forces me to slow down. i type faster than i can properly consider my thoughts, yielding fairly large amounts of junk. i find that when i put pencil to paper, i am already digesting my thoughts as i write them. there is a certain amount of self-editing that happens between my brain and the page. it’s not a lot, and i don’t pore over each word before i write it down, but there’s simply some kind of internal process that allows me to sift for effective word choice, accurate character voice, proper tone, as well as things like how this will work with the next scene, or will it only send me further off track. that sort of thing.

that’s what i’m telling myself, anyway. in truth, i probably just think too slowly to get consistently good results out of typing.

also, and this may well be the genuine reason, i like pencil. it feels right. scratching the surface of a page with the soft rasp of a good No. 2 feels real, tangible, in a way that typing, and even pen, doesn’t. it’s completely subjective, i know. and there are times when i like to just sit at the computer and run with the words to see what happens. in fact, that’s where manadan and gupti came from, which i really like. of course, i haven’t finished that one, but that’s a different story (no pun intended).

ouch. that was bad. sorry.

one last thing about the extra time for typing: the typing process can act as an additional draft, because it’s always the case that i find new problems, better (i hope) phrasing, single words or entire paragraphs or even pages to chop entirely because i was trying too hard in the first place, that sort of thing. i may revise as i type, even from revisions i have made on the page.

this was a fundamental part of the creation of Witness, but i’m not using it in this manner for No Good Deed, as an experiment with the process. i’m doing my best (not always successfully) to not revise as i type, but merely transcribe the text as is. this is helping me stick to my daily requirements of three pages a day, too, by not letting myself get lost in the revisions until i’m finished with the whole.

anyway, as you can see, i babble when i type. so i’ll cut that out now and get some sleep. hope that made sense, and again, thanks for saying hi. i hope things are well in your neck of the woods, too.

customer service, at its most basic (and, i would argue, its most helpful and most rare), is simply providing open communication. the specific business in question is irrelevant, as we’ve all seen this in the venues we interact with for, from offices to stores to software vendors to private industry and government. i have yet to identify a situation wherein silence is preferable to communication, in matters of customer relations, yet businesses continue to default to this mentality, thereby ruining otherwise positive situations.

bleh.

so, yes, tomorrow on the phone, even though i really, truly, honestly dislike being the squeaky wheel.

as for laughing, well, check back in a few months and we’ll see who’s laughing…if it’s Snap Pea, then i clearly haven’t been sleeping enough.

thanks again for stopping by.

Good luck with the leap. When you’ve been full time for a while, please come and guest blog on my blog. My readers ALL would like to be where you are right now, and would love to hear how it goes.