Kristin, no envy, bebe, or jealousy either. I can abrely remember what I wore yesterday, and have severe trouble from year to year remembering whether our anniversary (21st comng up soon) is 13 or 15 August.

The one thing I remember, with or without writing them down, are my own words.

sj, I love blank books, notebooks, sketchbooks etc. and I have many of them. Actually, a friend of mine is doing that "Artist's Way" thing and talked about doing the "morning pages" on her computer instead of handwriting them, so I thought I'd try that this morning. And I'm not sure, I think that I like the physical process of writing for this purpose. Plus, that sort of typing (it took me like 50 minutes to get my three pages) is very tiring and I type all day at work. On the other hand, I like typing and my handwriting is v. illegible. But my journals are mostly personal journals, not for others to read so I don't worry about it.

sumi, one of the things that brought about this question is the fact that I started doing morning pages again today. This is my third or fourth attempt at them. I usually go for long stretches where I do them, and then I will skip a day because I am being lazy or don't wake up early enough and then I get disgusted with myself and stop. I think writing with pen and paper is a very important for the morning pages, although I am not sure if I can describe why. I know that it is highly recommended in the books that they be done longhand with pen and paper.

Kristin, no envy, bebe, or jealousy either.

No worries Deb, it was a warm snuggly kind of envy. :)

I try to keep my typing to a minimum while I'm working, as a result of my messed-up wrists. So, for me, getting it all down on paper first saves me a zillion backspaces and some serious aches.

Plei, I've got the exact opposite problem; writing by hand is excruciating with the MS. Not that typing is All That, mind you, but it gets really iffy when I have to do long dedications in books. Ouchy.

Yeah. In many ways, I'd rather type (it is faster, and I can search for files by lines I know I've typed instead of having to tear my room apart looking for the RIGHT notebook when they all look alike), but handwriting is much less painful. However, I wish it weren't an either/or situation, for either of us.

(Curses healthstates in general)

(Curses healthstates in general)

(nods like a mad thing)

Hey, bebe, on topic: likely to have a spare couple of minutes next weekend? Depending on what time you and Paul and arriving (and what day), I can maybe feed my Seattle contingent some elegant simple food.

Hey, bebe, on topic: likely to have a spare couple of minutes next weekend? Depending on what time you and Paul and arriving (and what day), I can maybe feed my Seattle contingent some elegant simple food.

We're getting in Friday at some point. We may have a couple, but I'm not sure yet when and how many.

Yep, that's useful of me.

'tis no problem. We talk closer to time, oui?

And speaking food, we're off to dinner.

This might seem like it's better suited to the book thread, but I don't think so.

One of my favorite authors when a teenager was Jane Aiken Hodge. Gothic-type romances, set particuarly in Napoleonic Europe, but her characters have intelligence and humor. I just found out there are several books from her that I haven't read! (I was at the library today). The woman was born in 1917, and a new book of hers--the one I just finished reading--came out in 2000. God bless the long lived.

Anyway, in the dedication, she says she first started the story in 1950 and doesn't remember now why she put it aside, either busy with her family or she got into a plot corner or something. In 1998 she found it again and decided to finish it. So what she did, she left the first part of the story set in 1950, with all the assumptions and attitudes in place. There's a lovely young thing, a murder, an attentive and clever Scotland Yard man to save her from charges.

Fast forward a few decades. We discover that she married the policeman, who immediately quit his job to live off the money she inherited from the murdered woman to try and go into politics, which he fails miserably at. And he had an illegitimate daughter, who meets up with our heroine.

My point? How fascinating to have a book that shows a writer's intentions from both ends of her career, to see how she expresses the vast differences in the world at the two wildly disparate times. The teenager even says Fuck--though she apologizes profusely for the language. I nearly dropped the book in shock, because Jane Aiken Hodge always wrote these safe, proper books. I re-read one from when I was a teenager, afraid that it would have deteriorated under the changes in my reading tastes. But there are so many things I missed when I was a kid, like the fact that the young heroine listened to a housemaid get raped and murdered in the stables below her hiding place when soldiers broke into the estate. I'm sure I didn't get the significance of that scene when I read it the first time.

I'm thrilled to discover JAH's books are still good reading for me. I tried Dorothy Cannell, a criticlly acclaimed mystery writer, and I couldn't finish either of the ones I checked out because the characters were so self-consciously eccentric or stereotypically English-diffident. Not one normal person in the lot. New books by a favorite author, it's a happy thing.