We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby

Once sent off, the waiting process began. Would they accept it? Or would they reject it? In either event, a letter - and perhaps your returned manuscript - would eventually arrive in the post, usually about a month or two later (and only if you provided return postage and an envelope with your address on it).

That story - "The Boogeyman in the Closet" - was first written out in longhand on notebook paper. Then the laborious typing process began. When a typing mistake was made, and there were certainly plenty, one had to backspace on the typewriter to the offending character, use the correcting tape (you had to manually put it on top of the character you wanted to delete), and then retype the character.

This process erased your mistake, and then you could continue. It was either that or use white-out correcting fluid which usually made a mess of your manuscript.

To say that it was a pain in the backside would be to put it mildly. Well, those were the glorious 1970s, the days of Disco, before the advent of the personal computer - and a whole new way of writing stories and sending them off for possible publication.

As I advanced in my "writing career" (I seem to remember collecting far more rejection slips than anything else), my stories became longer. That first story was a mere three pages. Re-typing was really no big deal, perhaps an hour of work or so. But when the stories grew in length to maybe 30 pages or 40 pages, or 130 pages or 140 pages, then the process of typing - much less retyping - became most irksome.

There is no greater motivation to chuck a story than the thought that it needs to be retyped because you changed the plot a little bit and now everything is off kilter, or the page numbers are out of sequence, or you simply made too many typos the first time round.

Thus it was with a bit of joy that I discovered computers, and especially the word processor. Life became a whole lot simpler, and no longer did I have to make trips to the store for correcting film or endless bottles of white-out. With a word processor, you can simply correct your mistakes on the screen with no one the wiser.

My first computer was a laptop with a total memory capacity of a mere megabyte of RAM. Into that one megabyte, the operating system (DOS 5) had to be loaded, and then a text editor and the file you were editing - and that was about it.

That computer was a Toshiba 100, one of their very first laptop models (if I'm remembering all this correctly!), which I purchased in 1991 for about US$1,000. At that time, the switch was being made away from DOS and into Windows.

That was about 10 years ago, and I can tell you: things have changed.

With that old laptop, I could get a few games to work. Prince of Persia was a favourite - I somehow made it from start to finish in that game, the only one I ever completed. That, of course, required hours and hours of effort, but I was so taken by that laptop I could hardly keep my hands off it. Carmen San Diego also worked on that machine, as did some of the early Apogee games like Commander Keen.

Everything was done on floppies, from first loading the operating system, to working with files, saving files, playing games. I am still amazed at what could be done with so little memory. Everything in those days was sparseness and utility - no room for bloatware when you've got to fit things on a floppy disk and only 1,024 kbytes of memory at your disposal!

Today I have another laptop, but it's a tad more advanced. In RAM alone, it has 128 megabytes. The hard disk? From zero, I've moved up to 10 gigabytes (there's 20 gigabytes on my desktop). From a black and white screen, I've moved to glorious colour.

From no sound, I've gone multimedia with built-in speakers and enough power to play movies, audio CDs, MP3 files. There's a built-in CD-ROM drive, a network card, a touch pad instead of a mouse, and special buttons like the one with the envelope on it - I can just hit that button and the machine checks my email.

Of course, back in the good old days, there was no email. So when I wanted to know what an editor thought about a story, I had to wait for snail mail. Those waits were pretty hard to take! But these days, of course, an editor can pop off an email to you, telling you he or she loves your story and wants to buy it (rarely) or (more likely) that your story "just isn't right" for them.

So instead of waiting a month or two to be rejected, you can now be rejected almost instantly.

That's progress for you.

Even so, I wouldn't want to go back to those old days for anything in the world. I can't imagine going back to a plain old text editor, not after using my Star Office or Microsoft Word.

Operating systems, too, have improved. There's no longer a need to keep a manual at hand, just in case you need to make some exotic manouevres like renaming files or backing up files to a floppy, which required working use of the old DOS commands. The advent of the GUI (Graphical User Interface) has made a lot of the housekeeping chores pretty simple, no matter how you look at it.

The Windows road, from 3.1 to Windows ME, was pretty rocky. Some folks are still nursing their wounds over it. When all's said and done, one has to admit that Windows has become a lot more stable, reliable and useful. You can now generally add things to a Windows system - like a modem or a printer - without having to have a degree in rocket science, usually without even so much as reading the instructions for your new gadget.

That's certainly something.

The Toys

First computer: Toshiba 100 running on DOS 5, 1 MB RAM, No hard disk, one floppy disk. Current configuration: Compaq Presario 1400 running Windows ME, Pentium III 800 MHz, 128 MB RAM. 10 gigabyte hard drive. Built-in CD, sound, speakers, network, MP3 player, USB ports

Despite all the whistles and bells, I've discovered computers aren't really that helpful as far as getting published is concerned. They make the process easier, but the creative juices still have to stew, and good ideas are essential. I'm still working on that Great American Novel. Several, in fact.

And thanks to computers, I have all the beginnings of those works stored somewhere - beginnings waiting for middles and ends. And then there's the completed ones, that need a bit of editing. Thanks to the computer, I can now decide on a major plot switch and spend weeks or months trying to work it into the story, only to be dissatisfied and try something else!

When they invent a computer that completes novels and incorporates plot shifts, do let me know!