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There Was A Time…

Cut and paste is probably the biggest boon to the writer’s toolkit ever, followed by the advent of self-publishing.

I should go back to the last century (I was born in the 1950’s) when I first wanted to write Science Fiction. My heroes had names like Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury,  Clarke, Vern, Burroughs, and E.E. (Doc) Smith. Heroines bore names like Norton, McCaffrey, Sargent, and Atwood.

My handwriting was terrible in spite of constant caligraphy lessons mandated by the school system. By the 7th grade, it was still bad enough that one of my teachers surreptitiously presented me with a used manual typewriter and allowed me to turn in my homework typed out.

The ability to put my thoughts down on paper was finally realized. I could express myself at last!

To those of you who do not know, let me share the experience of typing your work. Instead of painstakingly scribbling words in long-hand, you would depress a key corresponding to each letter. This required strong fingers because it was a mechanical key that caused a small articulated hammer to swing up and strike an inked ribbon stretched in front of the paper you were writing on. In the case of a mistake being made, you had 2 choices, either roll the paper up several inches on the roller ( I should mention that each sheet of paper was hand fed into the device) and paint out the incorrect letter with white paint on a tiny brush, then wait a few minutes for it to dry, or just remove the sheet and start over completely.  

When I wrote, I wanted the science to be as real as possible. With that in mind, I spoke with the Astronomy Professor at the local college.  After several “over coffee” discussions, he was finally convinced to have his students plot travel routes between various stars as a class project, providing me with reasonable time vs. distances to base my stories on. There is nothing worse than telling your audience you have a model “T” Ford and are going to drive from Seattle to New York, but in your story it only took you 10 hours to get there.

Research took up long days and many handwritten notes. Hours in the city library poring over microfiche records and old books to understand the requirements of pioneering. If my fictional people were to discover, survey, colonize, and develop new planets, I needed to learn a lot more about the subject.