My dear and unfortunate readers, all four of you, will have noticed that last week Tingle Alley went on the equivalent of a blogger walkabout. Then came back. Then disappeared again.
Behind the scenes it’s been the best and worst of times. After the work spree of the past couple months I decided I needed a better way to separate my work life from my writing life, and even more importantly, a way to booby-trap my writing space so that I couldn’t access the Internet. Because while I can check email and my favorite blogs while work-working with little interruption in thought, it’s absolutely no good when I’m write-writing. And I find I have less impulse control about visiting the Internet than your average lab rat does about pressing the lever that gives out the sugar pellet .
Now, I have a friend who writes long-hand in coffee shops, which seems a good way to escape Internet distraction. But while I can write long-hand for awhile I don’t enjoy it. Also, my handwriting is atrocious — it looks like a spider shat all over the page. And being lucky enough to have a perfectly nice writing space at home, it seemed strange to have to leave it to get any writing done.
So a couple weeks ago I successfully bid on a red IBM Selectric II on eBay. Online research had verified the IBM Selectric as the “Cadillac of typewriters.” Moreover, back in the day, my first typewriter was a red IBM Selectric inherited from my mom (a court reporter), and so it’s pleasing to find one in the same color. Plus, red = pretty!
Move to present tense. The typewriter is sold to me by a very nice gentleman named Harry in New Orleans. After we strike a deal, he promptly ships off the typewriter. It arrives in Asheville just a few days later in a box roughly the size of a dishwasher and packed with styrofoam peanuts. Bags and bags worth of styrofoam peanuts — Mr. Tingle and I are ankle-deep by the time the typewriter is unpacked.
The typewriter is, as Harry promised, a beauty. I set it up on my desk, plug it in, and productive typing ensues. Days go by, pages pile up. I am largely oblivious and happy. During the work spree I managed an hour on the novel a day — not horrible but not satisfying, just enough to keep my hand in. So it feels fantastic to dip all the way back in, and I become convinced again that “this is something I can do.”
On day 4, the typewriter begins to turn off whenever I hit the Shift key. I peer around the top but can’t see anything wrong — but this is the same sort of ineffectual peering I do at the car and the dryer and basically any malfunctioning mechanical object. It means very little, my peering.
I decide I do not need the Shift key. Continue writing. Pages start to look as if typed by ee cummings on a bender. But it’s still all good.
Day 6 or 7 the typewriter’s motor starts turning off unprovoked. Then switching back on, still typing what was in the works when the motor died. The copy starts to look like, “the po w erful – toot hed gi ant
ra t ka ngaroo st rode into th e ro om.” More problematic but I decide I can roll with it. (Here is where I perhaps insert that when I was 17, I drove my first car, a little white Subaru, for several months without realizing that it was not customary when driving to have to engage the accelerator with a series of light taps before compressing it fully when one wished to increase speed. That it was indeed the sign that Something Was Wrong.)
On Monday the typewriter will not turn on at all. Or it does for a second then makes an ugly sound and dies again. This I cannot roll with.
Darkness descends. Sadness. Rebuff, not always polite, from several electronics-type-repair places unmoved by plight of pretty red IBM Selectric. Work lull is over. Deadlines loom again on the horizon.
The happy ending is I found a guy who fixes typewriters. Specializes in it, in fact. He is retired and lives “way out in the country” but he makes house calls. He arrived this morning with his traveling kit, a specially outfitted suitcase lined with tools and rags. He said he doesn’t get to work on a lot of typewriters anymore, just at a few lawyers’ offices around town.
He took the typewriter apart and pronounced her in excellent condition, just in need of some lubrication. (I bit my tongue there.) He cleaned it and lubed it and then patted it and told me he thought there were at least “two or three great American novels in there.”
He was excellent that way: At one point, he asked me if any of the keys were giving me trouble, and I said no, but that the “s” key sort of blobbed. Then I started this long-winded joke about how I had decided that I could never use the typewriter to type a ransom note as they’d be able to trace it back to me with that “s” key — and in my head I was thinking, “Jesus, Carrie, shut the hell up!” but he completely understood, nodding his head and saying, “That’s Sherlock Holmes, isn’t it?”
Near the end of the visit, he asked me to sit at the keyboard to test it and I noticed that in putting the typewriter back together, the sword of my Eowyn action figure had gotten snagged in the seam of the body. I was a little embarassed but pointed it out, and the guy said, “Well, then, we’ll have to rescue that damsel in distress, won’t we?”
He left an hour ago and I’m on my way back up to my writing space to reunite with the typewriter. Work is, indeed, gearing back up, but I’m looking forward to a long holiday weekend with the typewriter before I have to pay the work much more attention. And I hope whatever holiday plans you have, they are just as happy.
See you Tuesday!
That’s the best story about writing that I’ve heard in recent memory. Congratulations — your red typewriter sounds like a real beauty!
Comment by Lauren Cerand — 7/1/2005 @ 2:17 pm
Write like the wind! If your novel’s as well-written and engaging as posts like this then it will be jaw-droppingly good. I can’t wait to read all at the rat kangaroo’s adventures.
What a gorgeous typwriter repair guy. Wow. I think I’m in love.
Comment by Justine Larbalestier — 7/1/2005 @ 2:22 pm
Yay! You found a typewriter repair guy, and an awesome one, at that.
Comment by gwenda — 7/1/2005 @ 3:36 pm
Yeah, this is a great story, all the better because it has such a happy ending.
Comment by Michael — 7/1/2005 @ 4:45 pm
Wow. What an inspiring story. Is this the kind where you take out the ball (insert Lance Armstrong joke) and replace it with another one if you want, say, italics? Probably not, I reckon–I’m old.
There’s a typewriter store here…I’ve often looked in the window with a mixture of curiosity, nostalgia and sadness. I’m afraid I’m hopelessly wired.
Comment by Jimmy Beck — 7/1/2005 @ 5:00 pm
Oh, man. That is so much better than Apple Care’s slick DHL pick-up and drop-off, especially since my regular DHL guy is off today (he gets the “Aw, broken iBook?” look when he delivers the shipping box, then offers to wait while I pack it up). Hearing your stories really helps, as I recover from a workshop in which 10 of the other 13 were such deadline-flouting non-critiquing mental-illness-whining gits that instead of deadlines and General Readership considerations all I got was spitefully nonproductive. (Is there some scrub I can use for that? Gotham Begone?)
I totally feel you on the longhand writing thing, too. I just (just) bought two gorgeous snakeskin notebooks filled with thick creamy ruled paper and with the kind of supple bindings you can lay flat. I hope I use them for more than bookshelf-display ’start a new project, pls’ guilt, but my handwriting is not geared so much for communicating thought as for exhibiting impatience.
“Crap. Does that say ‘Sergei’ or ’scrotum’?”
Comment by Jessica — 7/1/2005 @ 5:24 pm
Yeah, I love your typewriter repair guy! Good luck writing meanwhile. I’m a longhand-in-coffee-shop, sugar-pellet-clicking gal too, & think it’s crucial to be writing somewhere without internet access…
Comment by Jenny D — 7/1/2005 @ 5:26 pm
Of course, a laptop sans wireless access (or in my case, a switch that I can turn off and that I place a small piece of duct tape over) will also do the trick. Plus, it comes with a warranty. Nevertheless, there are no bright red laptops (at least none with suitable character) along the imaginative lines that I’m now forming for your lovely little typewriter.
And an hour a day is very good writin’ indeed. Keep in mind that this stuff is hard work (and not in the Dubya sense). Synapse-burning labor. So good on you for finding your regimen.
Comment by ed — 7/1/2005 @ 6:43 pm
Weird. Your blog ate my last comment, dammit. But anyway, good on you for finding your regimen. That’s what I really wanted to say.
Comment by ed — 7/1/2005 @ 6:44 pm
What everyone else said.
Comment by birnbaum — 7/1/2005 @ 11:16 pm
Ditto Robert, plus:
An old anonymous kind of computer which is not online can be useful – I have an Acorn…and now intend to use it thanks to your inspiring story. Wish it was aqua…or red.
Als I knew a man many years ago who rediscovered God, threw in a highly invasive pot habit and became an excellent repairer of typewriters. (He started washing his hair again too.)
Comment by genevieve — 7/3/2005 @ 5:25 am
Thanks all!
I’ll post pictures this week of the Selectric beauty.
Comment by CAAF — 7/6/2005 @ 12:09 am
Ditto on the giant rat kangaroo with the powerful teeth. I really would like to read this too. Hint, hint.
I’m afraid I’m one of the wired — I’ve been earning my keep on computers since 1985 — although I’ll never forget the little turquoise portable I bought at K-Mart when I was 12. It had a black and red ribbon, which was the ultimate in portable high-tech at the time (or so I thought). It was a big step up from the Iron Maiden, the 1940s vintage black Underwood whose keys would clutch up in a death grip if you typed too fast.
These days my big thing is not computer versus longhand, but sitting in one place all the time — I’ve gotta have a laptop, so I can move around the house depending on sunlight, temperature, and noise. I have to be away from the TV when it’s on, or I get so annoyed by it I can’t concentrate.
Comment by murgatroyd — 7/7/2005 @ 4:45 pm
Tangerine Muumuu, You Ain’t Alone!
Jimmy Beck points to this page listing writers and their preferred typewriters, which seems apropos to Ms. Frye’s Not-So-Tangerine Writing Implement Epic….
Trackback by Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant — 7/12/2005 @ 4:43 pm
[...] I’ve been a fan of the lovely Ms Tingle Alley for some time now, but I think this is definitely one of her most gorgeous posts eva! And I speak as someone who can’t stand typewriters, though I do have a dim memory of my parents having a gorgeous red Olivetti one, and my longing to play with it, but that was before computers and word processing programs, without which I can’t even begin to imagine writing. And writing by long hand?! The utter utter horror of it! [...]
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