Kage Baker was an exceptionally cautious person. It was, I think, the foundation stone of her writing talent and success.

That was because she never began any project she intended to abandon. In fact, Kage would go to insane lengths to maintain and complete anything she started. Someday, I must recount our adventures with stained glass, enamelling, and menhir-carving.

Thus, she started to write her own stories when she was a small child and just never stopped. Instead of making friends, she found audiences in school, and became a bard.  She finagled pens and paper and typewriters and word processing systems out of friends, relatives and thin air so she never had to quit; she kept finding faster ways to write.

Those ways did not include ever actually learning to type. Kage was a 2-fingered typist all her life; but she was so fast, she  sounded like a Gatling gun with hiccups when she was at her best. She wrote right up to and including the day she died, by which time she had returned full circle to her original method: telling the story aloud to someone.

That was me. That is still me: Amenuensis At Large, Science Geek and Eccentric Research;  Total Fantasy By Special Arrangement. And I can type, too. I made my living more or less by typing for 35 years. And now I make my living, such as it is, by making Kage Baker and the world inside her head … live.

To tell the truth, I wouldn’t go back to a typewriter for anything less than an obscene amount of money. And a free typewriter. It might have to be one made of chocolate, too. And it would have to be replaced frequently … every 2 weeks, say, on Amazon Prime …

It does make me scream and curse when my computers go South on me, obviously. Today I have been running endlessly diagnostics and uploading endless drivers. My desktop is now almost functional … my Buke is still rebooting after I gave up and returned it to the dreaded factory defaults. There are still hours of customizing to do, removing crap I don’t want and replacing it with crap I do. Like, I hate McAfee. And HP Smart Friend. And Cortana, and all the other cybernetic nannies with which Microsoft is trying to saddle me.

But, you know what, Dear Readers? I shall persevere. Tonight is another entry pecked out with one finge on my Kindle’s candy-bar-sized screen: but I did it! It’s even about writing.

More, faster, better tomorrow! Wider horizons and bigger keyboards! Excelsior!