Happy Day

Okay, it's been a week, and I love my Alphasmart more than ever. It's completely changing my writing life.

It's compact and light and it didn't cost nearly what a laptop would, so I'm willing and able to take it with me everywhere and anywhere. And that means I can work everywhere and anywhere, and I can make use of what used to be downtime. (Like now, as I ride the commuter bus home from the day gig.)

That means I'm working, at least a little bit, every day. Right now I'm using Randy Ingermanson's Snowflake Method for Writing a Novel to try to get my story mapped out. It seems to be working--for the first time in my writing life, I have a plot that rises toward its climax and resolution with a tension you can feel--but there are tasks to be completed, and I keep tripping over what I don't know yet.

Before the Alphasmart, when I tripped over the unknown, I'd freeze, utterly intimidated by what I didn't know. Now, not so much. I'm comfortable sketching things out, noodling with ideas that I might keep or discard. It's faster than longhand, but it's less serious than using my PC...or something like that.

Plus, there's that work anywhere, any time, thing. I did a whole bunch of work this morning on the bus into work--I'm pretty sure I got a solid handle on a secondary POV character who was eluding me, and that work gave me the idea of writing my characters' biographies, telling the events of my plot from that each person's perspective. I think that's going to really help my characterization, which will make my story richer, and--because of the Alphasmart--I'll be able to work on the bios anywhere.

Life is good.