by Janis Patterson

Be warned. There is a rant coming!

I am old. I must admit it. Some people might even call me a dinosaur… an appellation I am proud to claim. I mean, how nifty to have someone talking about you and being interested in you a couple of million years after you died!

I even wrote my first real book on an ancient manual typewriter. (My very first book was done with pencil and paper, but I was only four I hadn’t learned to type yet. I was ten before I could convince my dad to teach me.) Then, a couple of books later I graduated to a portable electric – an SCM in cloud blue – and boy, did I feel like I was in tall cotton. It was like heaven, and the bulging muscles the manual had built up in my fingers gradually faded away. My problem was paper. Paper was (proportionally) more expensive then than now and each draft required paper. Lots of it.

I became adept at adapting and scavenging. I’d use old drafts, slash a Mark-A-Lot through the typed side (which bled through to the other side, creating some interesting problems on occasion) and type the new story on the back. Then one day I got lucky. A business in the building where I worked went out of business and put half a dozen reams of their stationery out for garbage. Needless to say the garbage didn’t get them. For at least three books I felt so elegant typing my rough drafts on 35lb (I think – it was definitely heavy) deckle-edged grey paper. Sad thing was, there had to be a clean final copy typed for submissions. In those antique days there were no Xeroxes, just a very messy and expensive wet process copy machine, so you had to watch your one precious clean copy like a hawk, or go spend the time typing a second one.

Finally computers came in. My first memory typewriter/computer was an Olivetti, at the time the world standard instead of IBM, which wasn’t selling in the US so they were practically giving them away. It had about a two page memory and showed one line of copy at a time. And we writers were delighted. I used that for about two books then IBM PC clones became affordable even to poor writers like me and I adapted. I gave the Olivetti to my mother, but she could never master it. She’d call in tears so often trying to make it behave – it did work as just a regular typewriter just as well and was grade-school simple but she and it never did mesh, so I finally took it away from her and gave it to some charity.

With a small succession of ever-more-useful PCs I upped my output and was very happy. Some of the later ones even had internal memory, but the luxury of saving to a floppy disk was wonderful. The best thing, however, was the cut-and-paste function. Until that cut and paste was actually that, with scissors and cellophane tape and a lot of retyping.
I went through computers fairly quickly, as the older PCs seemingly weren’t made to last. Nowadays though, the computers are made to last, but the MicroSoft programs are ‘upgraded’ with depressing regularity and even more depressingly higher prices. This is what made me so angry with MS that my darling husband gifted me with a Mac Book Pro eight years ago, and it has ticked along happily ever since then except for a couple of swelling battery replacements.Yes, there was a learning curve, but I overcame that through pure fury at MS, and now have acquired two more Macs, one solely for long distance travel and another waiting in the wings to supplement my ageing Pro.

And still MS tries to keep their bottom line by dictating ever newer program ‘upgrades.’

This is the basic point of this rather angry little screed. Why must we continue buying and rebuying to get new features that we do not use, do not need and do not want in order to keep support for the programs we do use, need and want? Why doesn’t MS put out a ‘writers version’ – slimmed down, practical and simple to use – that doesn’t have something unwanted and complicated added on with deadly and costly regularity? Same reason they are becoming reluctant to sell a program in a one-time buy, preferring instead to make customers rent it so they can bloat and complicate it even further with ‘improvements.’

The answer is obvious, and I could describe it perfectly with one or two possibly rude words that no lady should ever use.

And that is why I’m exploring and switching to other ‘office-style’ suites. Someday I am going to find the perfect one, and when I do I’ll share my choice with you in case you should want it.

Of course, I could – and do – just keep using the version I like, but I live in terror of my data simply evaporating some day. (I do keep various versions in various formats – paranoia can save your life…) If necessary, I could go back to the manual typewriter or (though my aged fingers tremble at the thought) plain white typing paper and a pencil.

The thing is, writers should be concentrating on their writing instead of having to constantly juggle with the tools of writing. Is that such an outrageous concept?