In the early days of the internet – errm, about 1999 – I bought my first domain. I’m not going to spell it out here because it’s long unused but I may snap it up again someday, but for the purposes of this story you should know it contained the word ‘type’.

I can type. No this isn’t dictated to a secretary. I can type pretty fast – 80+ WPM usually, faster if I get into it. Like many things you do on instinct it’s really more a question of ‘letting go’ to get to the faster speeds.

However, I’m self taught. When I started learning, I was on a typewriter. (Kids: a mechanical version of a Chromebook. Except all it could do was write words.) Typing on a typewriter is a distinctly different experience from a computer keyboard but it’s where I learned. I remember being pretty quick on it, but I was still a heads down, look at the keys guy.

I didn’t spend a lot of years (2? 3?) on a typewriter before I got my first computer with a real keyboard (no, the ZX Spectrum doesn’t count), which I actually used for writing (step aside, Amiga 500). As I typed my way through university and out the other side, my speed got a little faster.

My first job (as a journalist) inevitably involved a lot of typing so I got quicker, but even then – I’m pretty sure – I still typed looking at the keys most of the time. I was very much a two-finger typist.

Decades later I can type without looking at my hands (or even opening my eyes, apparently), but I am still mostly a two finger typist. Occasionally a third or forth will enter the equation, but while I know what the little nubs on the ‘F’ and ‘J’ keys (the ‘home’ keys) are for, I’ve never used them in anger.

So last weekend I tried it out. I found a free typing tutor site and started doing the exercises.

And boy, I cannot type using the traditional touch-typing method. No. It felt like trying to walk for the first time, or re-learning after some terrible injury. I’d tell my finger to poke ‘D’ and get ‘S’. I’d be sure I was about to type a ‘K’ and get ‘L’. It really felt like a fundamental part of me was broken.

*The ghostly fingers at Ratatype.com. My nemesis.*

It’s not, clearly, as I’m getting words out here, but I’m all the more acutely aware of when I mis-type (I just did, hitting 0 when I wanted the hyphen) now that a more refined method is potentially open to me.

Will I persist with the touch typing? I think I might. I’m not sure how many lessons and how much practice it might take to get to a point where the ol’ two-fingers get absorbed into a whole hand, but I think in the end, the effort might be worth it.

WritingJanuary 3, 2021January 11, 2021

Deep Thoughts, WritingDecember 17, 2018January 2, 2019

Always wanted to paint stuff. I don’t mean like, walls or whatever, I figure I can do that if I ever need to do it. I’ve always wanted to paint geeky stuff, and so this year, I started to try and do it.

Why? No real reason. It followed a path though, which I can trace:

Getting into action figures in late 2017/early 2018
Checking out cool customized action figures
Watching videos about how to customize action figures and thinking “Hmmm”
“Hmmm” leading to haunting Target and buying random painting stuff, like these paint markers
Leading to much browsing on Amazon and buying stuff like Gundam markers
Buying cheap, mass-market toys like this Spider-Man (pictured) to practice on, as it were (he needs webs, and they’re easily added with a Gundam marker)

Spider-Man - Titan Hero series (pre-painting) — Spider-Man – Titan Hero series (pre-painting)

Buying cheap plastic soldiers like this set of ‘Merry Men’ so I can tell myself if I mess up, at least I didn’t spend a lot (per figure)
Buying random paints and brushes – including three different types of paints, because I thought ‘all acrylic paints are the same right’ (They’re not)
Gradually, slowly, painting stuff over months and months (feels like: only from September, really)
Starting to kitbash, I guess, 1/64 scale (Hot Wheels / Matchbox) cars into post-apocalypse junkers for games like Gaslands, even though I won’t likely play it

It makes sense to me. This is why I have a second table in my office covered in this stuff, with drilled holes in the plastic (over-enthusiastic attempt to deconstruct a car) and paint marks everywhere.

And, I suck at it. I do. Which actually, if I’m being honest, is good.

Why?

Because it teaches me (gradually, slowly, with great reluctance) that you can suck and still have fun and it doesn’t matter – because as long as you finish, you can then get better.

Guess what this relates to. Go on, guess.

Yeah, painting (badly) helps me realize that I can write (badly) and it’s still worthwhile as long as I finish.

In an eerie but not unexpected parallel, I haven’t really managed to finish painting a single miniature in 2018. So I’ve got two weeks to get that done.

Next time, pictures, I promise.

WritingDecember 13, 2018January 2, 2019

Someone I follow on Instagram said the magic words recently ‘morning pages’. Ah, morning pages. Thee and I wouldst have words.

I mean, that’s the point. Morning pages are about words, and the generation of words, and the discarding of other things like ‘thoughts’ and ‘doubt’ and ‘penmanship’. Morning pages, as invented (I guess? At least the phrase was coined) by uhhh okay, you know, I’ve forgotten the name* but hey, it’s from a book called ‘The Artist’s Way‘, anyway they’re a thing.

The ‘thing’ being pretty simple: you get up and the first thing you do is write. You write preferably in longhand, and you write three pages (suggested, three pages of like, Letter or A4 depending on your country). When I used to do them, I used a bound A4 notebook, the kind you steal from work if you’re in a White Collar Office.

Three pages is simultaneously nothing and the entire goddamn world of effort.

Because it’s three pages, in theory wrote continuously, without stopping, and crucially without thinking and without judgement, which is the all-important and nigh-impossible part.

Morning pages are about getting past the voice in your head that tells you that you suck. If you don’t have that voice you’re an alien. And that voice can be very unhelpful and self-destructive, so morning pages are about getting past it and getting towards something more, I guess, pure and artistic and all that.

I ‘morning paged’ for, I dunno, about half a notebook. A decent length and a decent number of days, and I stopped, to be honest, because it was becoming basically ‘The Diary of Stephen Reid Aged 33 and a Third’, or something, I can’t remember when I did it. It got too confessional. I got somewhat paranoid about it being a secret diary rather than a bunch of old rambly shite. So I ditched it.

But, they (the pages) have uses beyond that. The simple process of sitting down first thing in the morning and writing words, without editing, without self-censorship, builds something. Like muscle, only it probably matters more to you.

Anyway, that’s it. Morning pages. They’re a thing. They’re useful? You should try it. Or just type total bollocks into an empty WordPress entry, like this.

* Julia Cameron, I realized later.

Writing, WrittenJanuary 27, 2018December 13, 2018

I woke up this morning, aided by the cats as usual. I went downstairs, laptop in hand, thoughts of the day. Despair. Hopeful-lessness. Pain.

I sat in the sunken end of the couch and pulled back one curtain, like I would do during the day, but this time I only exposed the dawn. The night, really.

And something about that made me write. For the first time in forever.

But in a weird way.

I’m writing this, right now, with my eyes closed. Pause for dramatic effect (actually I paused while I got my thoughts together).

So, yeah, apparently I know my own keyboard pretty well, so this is a thing I could do. Who knwew?

I wrote the below after I sat down. And partially my eyes were closed, but mostly they were open, because I was staring at a white van that’s always parked outside my house. (It’s my neighbor’s. Don’t freak out.) I wrote with my eyes open, but fixed on the world outside, letting my fingers move without looking at them, letting the words pour out without judging them or even seeing them. Hence, the typos. Below this version I’ll put one with typos corrected, if the mere idea offends you.

Oh, and FYI, yeah, I cleared up the text here. Who wants to write an intro riddled with errors?

(PS: Yes, I switch tense in the first/second paras. Deal with it.)

nightmorning

(written c. 6:32AM – january 27th 2018)

A single cold light bears down on the hard white surface, dully reflecting in the thin morning air. Shadows fall by the wayside, uncared for, lost and alone. The street pays no attention to these things. The street does not care.

The detective took another long look at the scene and then turned away. Enough. Enough for one night, enough for one life. Too many cases. Too much death.

The sides of the van were bloody. Red trailed like paint left slapdash on the outside. The door handles looked like nostrils in a white bone skull, and it was appropriate, Ray knew. because inside the van were three bodies. The three people he’d been looking for. Who he never found, alive at least.

He didn’t want to look. Didn’t want to pull open those doors, witness what was inside, acknowledge the crimes that had occurred. So he stood. He watched. He prayed.

The skin was beginning to color. Orange fades, like a campfire burning over the horizon. Campfires were something that he remembered, something that he wished he’d seen again, but no more. Not since she left.

The orange shifted into a dull, paint mixed grey. White clouds mixing with the reality of the day, coming forth to choke him. The cold light above the van was beginning to fade, pale fluorescents dimming in the ambient light. Still he waited. Prayed. Watched.

A blinking light passing in the sky signaled the arrival of the 530 from Houston. He knew the airline schedule like the inside of his skull, because they’d used it. All of them. Inside the van. That had been the trap.

A cheap airport pickup service. Everyone’s looking for them, everyone wants them, but these three had to go get in the wrong one. Last flight they’d ever take.

He’d tried to think of them, cramming themselves into the waiting white coffin, uncaring, unknowing, just thinking about home and family and sleep. Not thinking about the future beyond the next 20 minutes. Not thinking about their family beyond who needed a kiss goodnight, who needed to be snuggled in bed. Not thinking. Who can blame them, he thought. I’m the same.

Orange burnt sky was giving way to the blue black mix he expected, now. The sun was starting to assert it’s dominance, to finally push the night back, banish the white he knew was going to occupy his mind forever. He sighed.

“Open it up,” he said. They advanced, a crawling line of blue, to do his bidding.

First draft of post — How the draft of this post looked written blind.

nightmorning — How the above looked after first… draft, I guess.

TestingJanuary 10, 2018January 4, 2021

Here we go.

Heading 1. Now bold; now italic; now both.

Heading 2. Bold. Italic. Both.

Heading 3.

Heading 4.

Heading 5.

Heading 6.

Preformatted.

Here’s a link somewhere.

List, bulleted:

Item 1.
Item 2.
Item 3.

List, numbered:

Item 1.
Item 2.
Item 3.

Well here comes a quote.

“It’s not because it’s New Year’s Eve, and it’s not because I’m lonely. I came here tonight because when you want to spend the rest of your life with someone, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”

Apparently icons are a thing now? 

Errr that’ll do.

Dropcaps are a lovely thing. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. She sells seashells on the sea shore.

Oh, BOLD, ITALIC, ~~strikethrough~~, _subscript and ^superscript