Process, Part II

Process, Part II – How and Where

By hand or by laptop? Desktop or netbook? Word or WordPerfect? Kris & Dean – Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith, who present workshops Oregon Writers Network up in Lincoln City, highly suggest those writers looking to break away and break out and become full time writers have separate offices for marketing and writing if at all possible.

It's not, for me. Not only would I spend all my time hauling cats off two desks and out of two offices and finding things I've misplaced in each, I can't afford it and, my husband would claim if I were silly enough to show him this, I've already taken up most of the rest of the house anyway.
But I didn't start using Word until I started ghostwriting nonfiction books and, sorry Microsoft, I hate it. Loathe it. Despise it. I find it dictatorial and pushy beyond reason and, most of the time, wrong. But it's the standard for no reason I can think of, it and its blue screen of everything-you've-been-doing-has-been-lost death, so I use it for nonfiction.

And I use WordPerfect, which is cheery and has a sunny personality and is most polite about not intruding on what I want to do, for all things fiction, turning files to rtf for emailing or even into Word files when editors want. And that alone separates the fiction and nonfiction nicely.

Add to that I do a lot of the fiction writing under a tree at a picnic table with a creek full of runoff snow behind me and there I sit for hours, drinking lo-carb Monster and talking to magpies and crows and little finches and woodpeckers, squirrels and quail and the occasional marmot and growling territorially if anyone comes near my tree and picnic table. I write by hand, in gel ink that covers me in glitter (OK, glitter gel ink, did I mention I'm 12?) in blank books.

When I sit down at my desktop, at home, in my office and open WordPerfect, I'm either working on a second draft, or marketing. And you know? It works.