My unrequited love affair with the phantasmagorical typing device in the post below below got me thinking about the tools of the writer’s trade.

Three decades ago, when I was starting out, there seemed to be great fascination with writing implements. Almost every author profile contained a few obligatory questions about his or her preferred method of getting words down on paper. Do you use an electric typewriter? A manual? Do you still write your stories in longhand? Just a few years later, such questions became even more common, but now the goal was to find out which authors still hammered away on their IBM Selectrics and which had embraced the future by purchasing one of those newfangled computers – a “word processor,” as most of us called the hardware in those days. Writers who had taken the plunge were looked on with some measure of awe, but those who clung to older technologies were also admired, honored for being more concerned with their stories than the equipment used to tell them.

It might be my imagination, but it seems some of this interest has faded over the years, perhaps because it’s assumed that everyone now uses a computer – a state of the art something or other running some sort of topnotch software, most likely Microsoft Word. The loyal diehards who cling to their typewriters and pens are no longer viewed as dedicated pros. Quirky or downright strange is more like it.

The sad thing is, writers in years past often had great affection for their typewriters. They could talk at length about the ruggedness, reliability, ergonomic beauty, creative benefits and even the humorous eccentricities of their particular machines. They felt as if their typewriters were full partners in the lonely and difficult business of turning ideas into stories, and they spoke about them as such. Compare that to today. You almost never hear authors wax rhapsodic about their laptops. And why would they? Typewriters are distinct individuals with unique personalities. Computers are faceless, uniform drones, one the same as the next. Used one, used ‘em all. If you do happen to praise your computer, you’re more likely to talk about its speed, memory, hard drive size, graphics capability or utility as a video and mp3 player than its reliable but utterly unsurprising word-processing abilities.

Personally, I miss the typewriter I used back when I was starting out – an Olympia electric that looked exactly like this. It served me well through four early novels and countless short stories, poems and other bits of ephemera. She was a beauty, a workhorse and a friend. She spoke in a smooth and gentle purr that occasionally deepened into a sexy, throaty growl. She was sometimes demanding but never truly obstinate. She never missed a day of work, and when I was tempted to skip out, she would glare at me quietly until I sat down and got busy. I loved that machine with all my heart and still do, though she is long gone. I’ve never felt remotely the same about any of the many computers that followed in her wake.

I’m also one of those oddballs who loves fine pens and still likes to write early drafts in longhand, though I don’t do it nearly as much as I used to, thanks in large part to my “day job,” which requires me to spend many hours every week scribbling notes at meetings – sometimes as much as 20 pages of notes for a 60-minute city council session. After that, when it comes time to really write, longhand can feel frighteningly like drudge work.

Of course, nothing ever stays the same, does it? Nor should it. Such is the advance of progress, the march of time.

Still, it’s a melancholy feeling, this realization that we have gained so much … but lost so much along the way.

I want one of these:

Keyboard extraordinaire

No, seriously. I really, really want one.

If I had a keyboard like that, I surely could write the Great American Novel. Or perhaps, if I typed the right combination of keys at the right time of day, on the right day of the month, I would find a way to bridge the gulf of space and time, unravel the eternal mystery, and raise the spirits of H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. Together the five of us — me, Herb, Jules, Artie and the keyboard — would fly around the world in our fabulous airship and have all sorts of astonishing adventures.

Either way, pretty cool.

After an embarrassingly simple little fix, the site now looks pretty good in IE6. There’s still a minor rendering issue that grates on my nerves, but at least the sidebar finally lives in the right place on the page when viewed with older browsers.

Of course, you should still update/upgrade/change your browser for all the reasons mentioned below.

Here’s a question for you: How many blogs do you read?

And a more pertinent question: How many blogs do you miss when they’re not updated on a regular basis?

At the moment, I subscribe to – hold on, let me check. Okay, I’m back. According to Bloglines, I currently have 41 newsfeeds, scattered across categories that include “news” and “writing and literature” and “horror“ and “technology” and good old “miscellaneous,” among others. Is 41 feeds a lot? I’m not sure, but it sounds like a lot. It’s probably more than average, but I hope it’s not enough to make me seem like some kind of weirdly obsessive techno-nerd.

Anyway, of the 41 feeds, only seven or eight would qualify as blogs, and of those, only a few are updated on a regular or near-regular basis. And of those, the only one that I miss when I don’t get my daily fix is Neil Gaiman’s Journal.

I hope all of you are familiar with Neil Gaiman. If you’re not, stop right now, read no further, and get thee to Amazon or Borders or Barnes and Noble or Waldenbooks or The Little Shop Around the Corner and correct this deficiency immediately. You will not be sorry. Whether you’re talking about his novels, his young adult literature, his short stories, his comic book work or anything else he’s created in his eclectic and wildly productive career, Neil Gaiman is one of the best we’ve got – probably one of the best we’ve ever had.

His journal is just like the rest of his work: cozy, welcoming, diverse and quirky, chock full of fun stuff and interesting facts, serious, funny, caring and carefree, a bit strange at times, occasionally very strange, and always overflowing with the warmth of a generous spirit. On any given day he might be answering questions from readers, describing his latest reading or speaking engagement, giving a weather update from Minnesota or his current location on the road, praising the work of another writer or artist, posting a picture of his latest haircut, stressing the importance of protecting free speech, griping about deadlines, celebrating the birth of a new story, or pointing his readers to some odd but fascinating little corner of the Internet. He and his cohorts also make sure his site has plenty of entertaining attractions for readers/visitors, like this cloud comprised of words that appeared in his journal over the past six years or this bizarrely addictive little device – all of which are shared first with journal readers.

Neil is pretty good about posting something every day, sometimes more than once a day, but when he misses, I notice. I think, “Hey, there was no Neil Gaiman post today. Damn.” And that’s more than I can say about the other blogs I follow.

I think all of us should have something like Neil Gaiman’s Journal in our lives – a friend who drops in at odd hours to enlighten us, make us laugh, make us think, confound us, or just make us feel better about the world for a few minutes.

Neil Gaiman at DreamHaven Books

Neil Gaiman on Amazon

It’s come to my attention that this Web site – which I think looks quite fetching, by the way – does not look attractive at all when viewed in old versions of Internet Explorer. It’s just fine when using the new IE7, which is much closer to being compliant with current Web-coding standards than its predecessors. The site also looks great in alternative browsers like Opera and Firefox, two programs that helped write the book on standards-compliance. But IE6? Alas, no. IE6 does nasty things to the sidebar and completely messes up certain other behaviors. In IE6 this site is, to use the vernacular, totally borked.

I’m going to study up on the arcane sub-field of Web development known as “IE hacks” — an array of tricks you can use to make IE6 (and IE 5 and IE4) behave properly — and with any luck, this site will someday look perfectly acceptable, even when viewed with an antiquated browser.

In the meantime, may I recommend one of the free downloads listed below? Any one of them is preferable to IE6. They’re more stable. They’re faster. They’re packed with many more features. They’re more standards-compliant. And most important, they are much, much more secure than IE6 could ever hope to be.

Check out one of them, or check out all of them. You won’t be sorry.

Firefox 2

Opera 9.1

Internet Explorer 7

For an old guy, I’ve been getting into a surprising amount of Web 2.0 stuff lately. Bookmarks on del.icio.us. Bloglines and Google Reader accounts. Even a myspace page, set up in a moment of weakness last year, when I was struck with a sudden fear that the whole world would be using myspace some day and I’d better reserve my username in a hurry. (For the record, I set up my page and haven’t been back since, except to visit a few writers’ and musicians’ blogs that I enjoy following.)

Why am I doing all these things? Beats me. It’s nothing more than curiosity, I suppose. If you hear enough people talking about the same things long enough, you’ll eventually cave in and check them out for yourself.

In all honestly, I’ve been put off by a lot of the Web 2.0 buzz, which seems like nothing more than hype-in-hyperdrive. But I find myself liking the technology a lot.

After years of using many different RSS aggregators – various Outlook plug-ins, Firefox Live Bookmarks and Sage, and Opera’s built in reader – I didn’t quite understand the benefit of having a third party gather my news and store it online. I’m still not sure I get it completely, but I will admit it’s handy to have access to all the same feeds on all the different computers that I use, no matter where or when I use them. Of the two services I use, I like Bloglines a little better than Google Reader. It seems a bit more casual and homespun, while also performing a little smoother and swifter, at least on my machines. Both are pretty nifty, however, and if you’re thinking of trying a Web-based service, I could enthusiastically recommend either.

Del.icio.us was another one that initially baffled me, a philosophy I just couldn’t comprehend for a very long time. You use a Web browser to surf, right? And every Web browser saves your bookmarks or favorites, right? So why do you have to keep those same bookmarks online? Then I tried del.icio.us and pretty much fell in love with it right away. As with newsfeeds, it’s very handy to have all your bookmarks in sync at all times, no matter where you are. I like the tagging system, too — it makes so much more sense than endless folder hierarchies. And I absolutely love the ability to search through the millions of bookmarked sites that other users have shared. Sometimes those are the most interesting, enlightening, entertaining and helpful searches you can do – and they are available to everyone, even if they don’t have a del.icio.us account.

I doubt I’ll ever take the leap and abandon my “Web 1.0” life completely. As an example, I still use a built-in feed reader to keep me abreast of the four or five sites I need to follow on a timely basis, since it dumps the stories right into my e-mail as soon as they arrive; I don’t need to go to Bloglines or Goggle and read through a long list of 150 stories from 35 different feeds to find them. And I imagine I’ll still bookmark most critical sites on my various computers, just so they’re always right there at my fingertips. But I’ve still delved farther into the social Internet than I ever thought I would, and so far, it’s been a pretty interesting trip.