Old school

The house was gloriously quiet and still today, allowing me to get back to World War 3.3. As I expected, I wasn’t able to spin up from nothing to seven hours of two-fisted manuscript punching. But I managed four hours of concentrated work, and I’m gonna take that as a win.

Mostly I worked at my desktop, but I got to one part of the chapter I’m working on at the moment (a little spoiler alert: Kim Philby and Guy Burgess tooling around the Outback, playing at saboteurs) and I thought, you know, now would be the time for these two to have a talk about everything going on in their lives.

First, I had to check that I hadn’t killed them off in the original series. So I went to my Axis of Time GPT and asked whether any of the Cambridge spies had been mentioned. It assured me that they hadn’t, which doesn’t mean I didn’t write something about them, because as we’ve all learned, the robots just make stuff up. But this GPT is reasonably robust, and I’m pretty sure that in this case I can trust it. Still, if anybody recalls me mentioning Philby, Burgess, or Maclean at any point in the last twenty years of writing these books, please let me know so I can get on with my retconning.

Anyway, I was trying to imagine myself into the scene where these two are having a deep and meaningful about the weird lives they’ve led after the Transition, and I thought, it’s just not happening for me. Probably because I was still getting over the inertia of the three-week break for the roof repairs.

So I decided I’d do it old school. I would write the scene by hand. Of course, old school these days involves an e-ink tablet and a stylus, so I pulled out my cheap Chinese scratch pad and started writing.

It was slow going. I’m still blocking out the scene. But I was reminded once again of how the different forms of writing seem to call on different parts of the brain.

Mostly these days, I draft with dictation, and I’ve built up those neural pathways to where I’m really comfortable doing it. Occasionally, I’ll draft at the keyboard, but mostly I do my editing there.

The last time I routinely worked with pen and paper (and it was actually pen and paper, not an e-ink tablet) was when I was grinding my way through Leviathan and would hit a wall. I knew I was trying to make some big thinky point about the history of the city, and for some reason, it just wasn’t coming to me.

At that point I was living in Bondi. I’d take myself off for a walk up and down the beach, interrogating myself about what it was I was trying to say. And when I had a better idea about it, I’d pull out my notepad and pen, and I’d just sit down and write the proposed section out longhand. It seemed to help.

So that’s where I was today. That’s where I am right now, as it happens, so I’d better get back to it.