hard copy

A very exciting event has occurred in my writing life… I now have a printer! Thanks to a good friend of mine who gave me a brand new one.

The first thing I did last week when I finally got it plugged in was to print everything. I printed my picture books, my short story, my poems, my bits and pieces of future projects… and then I printed the novel.

I know it’s not done, the novel, but it’s long! And it took a long time to print.

There are nineteen different chapter files; a few have only one or two pages of single-spaced text, but others have twenty-five to thirty pages; there are at least a dozen “free-write” files, comprised of scenes that were originally handwritten and are now typed in but have not yet been inserted into the corresponding chapters; and then there’s the “miscellaneous notes” file that holds thirty-three pages of everything from one-liners to multiple-paragraph chunks, also not yet placed into the body of the text… or maybe waiting to see if they’ll be used at all.

It can be a little bit overwhelming to consider all of this material in a window housed in a twelve-inch laptop screen! But now, because of the miraculous workings of this wonderful thing we call “printer”… I can hold all of these pages in my hands. The hard copy.

Piled into a big stack, they feel like a book. They look like a book.

The stack is thick and heavy. I can flip through it. No scrolling! It’s very satisfying. Or, I can spread the pages out, everywhere, all over the desk, the bed, the floor. I can see all different parts at once. This is a really important part of the process for me.

So, I just want to say how grateful I am for this gift.

No longer will I have to fess up to people that, “Well, I don’t have a printer.” And they look at me and say, “Aren’t you a writer?” And I say, “Yeah, but…”

It’s just too cool, and it has already helped beyond measure. More about that to come soon, but it’s all very exciting.

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