My Baby Computer

Sore hands are the pits. They serve no purpose - they do not make us wiser or nicer or prettier or happier. But new baby computers are as far from the pits as it is possible to get. New baby computers are the high place, the right-up-there ... the anti-pits.

I've bought a netbook. It is small and light and portable - a baby of a computer - and I can type on it in many of the situations when I would normally use a pen and paper and make sore hands sorer. But typing doesn't hurt. Bliss!

Like an actual baby, it takes a little while to get to know it well. Also like an actual baby, it is probably not a good idea to allow the cat to sit on it. Or to drop it from a great height. And already it is having some effect on the process of my writing. My netbook's maiden voyage is a new book, working title Silver Skin. Because I am at the beginning - writing down ideas, snippets of dialogue, asking myself questions, pondering answers - there are a lot of pauses. My baby computer notices these in a way my pen never did. If I don't write anything for a while, it starts to nod off. If I still don't write anything, it goes completely to sleep. This isn't really a problem, but it certainly makes me aware of the passage of time between one thought and the next, or along the length of a single thought. I've yet to discover if this irks or inspires.

If the baby analogy holds, it'll be a bit of both.