My book Last Gentleman Standing is just out. It’s a refurbished version of
an early work of mine, Bluestocking,
and I’ve been thinking about what a different world it is for a writer now than
when I first composed the story. This book was written on an electric typewriter.
I think it was an IBM Selectric. Have you even heard of them?
If I wanted to
make changes (beyond some minimal typo correction), I had to re-type the whole
manuscript – hundreds of pages. There was no cut and paste and edit on screen. There
just barely were screens, and most writers (outside CERN) didn’t have them. Of
course you could literally cut up the pages and rearrange them with actual
paste. Messy.
My editors and copyeditors
added their comments with pencils, and I responded in the same mode. Then the
typesetters took over. I read and, if necessary corrected, paper galley proofs,
using a whole vocabulary of proofreaders’ marks that hardly exist any more. Then
typesetters came back and fixed things for the printer. No ebooks, because what
would you read them on?
Readers who wanted to get in
touch had to write letters to the publisher, with pens, which the publisher
would then forward to me. It could take weeks from start to finish. Snailmail
indeed.
And yet I am not so very
ancient! Technology has zoomed like a rocket in these years, so that I can sit
in a café (as I am right now) and watch everyone else interact with their phones,
and only their phones. And why I can say things that would have made zero sense
when I was young. (Your age may differ.) For example: IM me the directions. Bitcoin is a decentralized cryptocurrency. Please
delete that Tweet. Can I stream that movie?
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