Electronic Shorthand

Like many writers, I prefer longhand to keyboard composition. There’s something natural and calming to holding a pen in one hand and head in the other, imagining away the day before a stack of paper.

Like most writers I don’t have time for longhand composition. The great nemesis of creativity—work—limits writing time to minutes a day, except on the weekends. If I ever wish to get published, I have to do it with my hands in my lap. (I have a laptop that serves as my ersatz brain.)

Editing, in my experience, is easier on a printed manuscript. The electronic world plays tricks on your eyes. We have to develop the skill to read on a screen. For over five thousand years writing was strictly hardcopy. Now it almost never is.

When my novel, The Passion of the Titans, had been accepted by Vagabondage Press, I was elated. It has been a lifelong dream to have a novel published. Then the clouds rolled in. I had an email stating they’d decided to publish electronic only. (This was before the contract was completely reneged.)

I was deeply disappointed. I’m older than ebooks. I would’ve wanted to hold my book—my baby—in my hands. I would want to write my name inside the cover. The physicality of the thing would be almost carnal.

That day never came, of course, and the manuscript has been making the rounds of futility ever since. It is still my dream that some day it may become real. By limiting words to electronic format only, we have trapped them.

I fear a comet’s tail or a large solar flare. What if the network goes down? What if data is lost? I have thousand and thousands of creative words in story and novel form, not printed anywhere, but stored only on magnetic media.

I feel so vulnerable.

I don’t envy monks in their medieval monasteries much. Still, in the scriptorium to the scratching of pens on parchment I can hear my name. Eternity is never closer than pen on paper.

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K. Marvin Bruce

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