Once More With Footnotes

— the best word-processor is the one you've learned to use.
     
                  And over the years I have carefully added a handful of other progra mmes — a diary program, an electronic telephone book, and a superb notebook called Info Select.
     
                  The key to electronic contentment is to be sure of what you want and try to find the programme/hardware setup that helps you get it. I suspect that the average fiction author uses a small percentage of the capabilities of a modern word-processing programme. We require a minimum of fonts or fancy layout. A fiction author who sends a publisher a manuscript utilising every font their printer can print is probably a n author who would use three exclamation marks for emphasis!!! For most of us, the word-processing computer is little more than a sophisticated glass typewriter.
     
                  But right from those ZX81 days my dream was to work on a whole novel, all in one go. None of this messing around with tiddly 20K files for me — if a scene occupying my attention on page 270 involved changing a minor detail back on page 2, I wanted to make that change now. And I wanted everything to happen instantly (more or less). And I wanted a sc r een that I enjoyed looking at. Why not? I have to look at it for a large part of the day.
     
                  And I made a vow, as various books sold and money came in, not to tolerate unnecessary limitations. When WordPerfect couldn't be persuaded to help me in one or two editing tasks, I paid those skilled men at Ansible Information to write me some little bolt-on programs that would do the job. In short, I've taken every opportunity to bend the machinery to my way of doing things, rather than the other way round.
     
                  I've e nded up with a system powerful enough to meet the needs of a medium-sized office, all its power devoted to letting one man have the time of his life working in exactly the way he's always wanted to work.
     
                  I needed this. It's the business of writing that t akes time. It's the letters that sleet in, all welcome (except the one inviting me to fill up my VAT form) but all requiring some sort of response, activity, decision, reply. I have to write about two novels' worth of letters a year — without the machine, I ' d be hemmed in by filing cabinets covered with Post-It notes. Since I am to methodical filing what King Herod was to the Bethlehem Playgroup Association, the ability to dig out an old letter by letting the computer search for a few key words it must have c ontained has been a boon.
     
                  There is a price. I'm a pathological backer-upper. I back-up onto floppy disks. I back up onto a tape drive. I back-up onto a second, rather older machine whose main function these days is to sit in the corner of the office and be backed-up-onto. But it's a small price. I don't trust paper. Paper always lets you down. Computers, in my experience, don't get clipped to other computers and misfiled, or slip down the back of the desk; nor does someone scribble a note on the back of a computer and walk off with it. I'm happy with what I've put together. I feel I'm working my way, not the way some software writer thinks I should work. I haven't gone a-whorin' after glossy new programmes — good software stays, and I learned to use it so f a st that I touch-type through the commands.
     
                  People say: but does it change your life? No, it doesn't. But breathing doesn't change my life, either. Of course, if I stopped breathing now I've become so used to it, that'd probably change my life quite drama tically ...
     

First appeared in The Roots of Fantasy: Myth, Folklore & Archetype, ed. Shelley Dutton Berry, The Book of the World Fantasy Convention, 1989.
     
    I've adjusted this slightly and filled in some detail. The stuff about the nuclear pixy is stone-co ld true.
     
    There's another story about that power station that's just waiting to happen.
     
    You see, power stations take a long time to build. Large items of construction plant spend their entire working life on the site, until they break down beyond hope of repair. What can you do with a clapped-out bulldozer? Well, you've got lots of spoil and junk anyway, and you need to landscape the place, so you bury it in a huge mound, maybe along with a couple of mechanical diggers to serve it in the Next