Jumbled Words

I’m at the part of the book that feels like running downhill really fast, which feels like a bit early. Can I keep that up for another 15,000 words? Not sure. What I do know is that I’ve only done about half my plots yet, so maybe I need to re-think. Later. When it’s not November.

And for something else entirely… It’s a million years since I did one of these, so I thought I should give it a go.

When I was about ten my grandparents lived in this house out in the middle of nowhere that my grandfather built without help of any contractors. It was big and it was build to incorporate the small, two room cottage that my grandmother grew up, which became the living room and a bit. Upstairs grandmother had a weaving room, and grandfather had his office. It was this mystical room with creaking floorboards, an enormous desk, lots of little trinkets on shelves and most importantly, a typewriter. It was an electric one, a fancy thing that I could spend hours just writing my name on because I loved the sound.

When they grown-ups got tired of me spending all my time visiting in this room they dug an old, manual typewriter out of storage somewhere and let me take it home. It looked something like this, but was green. It had ribbons that were half black, half red, and you had to use all your strength to push each key down or it wouldn’t leave a mark. And if you didn’t land your finger directly on the right key it HURT.

I spent so much time writing on it that it’s amazing my parents didn’t murder me in my sleep. Seriously, the sound of a manual typewriter is loud, monotonous and it never ended. Ever.

Of course, because it took so much strength to write just the simplest sentence, I still covetted a typewriter just like my grandfather’s. An electric. It was like, the fanciest thing you could imagine, back then. I read the books about Mimmi by Viveca Sundvall and was jealous of her typewriter, because even though it was pink and lacked the Z-key it was electric and thus awesome.

I started to save up for a nice one. When I had about 500 SEK (which took forever, my weekly allowance was like 20 SEK) my grandparents took pity on me and gave me the other 500 needed to buy one. And so I had A REAL TYPEWRITER. My poor, old-fashioned, much more aestethically pleasing manual typewriter was put back up in the attic, and I wrote up a storm. Because somewhere in betweeen the two I had started writing stories. Mostly I wrote about girls with long, long names Jessamyn “Jess” Martinsson was a favourite, thanks to Sweet Valley High past generation book, the title which I have repressed) so that I could shorten them and therefore get to use the “-sign, which was my favourite key.

And then I started junior high (ish, age 14-16, what oh what should I call that?) and we had old, old, old school Macintosh computers, which were then embarrassingly out of date (about ten years old). I think it was the 128k, but I’m not entirely sure.

And that, my friends, was when I first discovered the joy of using italics in my writing.