Monday, September 3rd.

I have ventured into a new venue. Imagine: When I was born, there was no television. When I was a kid, Howdy Doody invited me to join his club -- in black and white. The sixties brought bikinis and non sequiturs during prime time, and Ed Sullivan knew the Beatles were the next best thing. My first computer experience was on a Commandor. Then, the Apple IIE became state of the art. IBM was mainframe and filled whole rooms.

I typed manuscripts on an Underwood portable, then wrote my first novel on a Selectric. It could have been improved, but by the time I'd retyped it six times, I really didn't want to retype a page or chapter just to make one sentence more dynamic or include another paragraph.

Then came the pc revolution. I bought a desktop Gateway and a dot matrix printer, where I wrote my second novel. I progressed through laptops and laser printers to an HP All-In-One and new desktop. My latest toy is an Alphasmart Neo portable word processor. It weights a quarter of what my laptop does, and runs on AA batteries. No boot-up time, no power cords, no panic at low battery lights. It goes camping, to the bagel shop and a glass of tea, to the deck with a bit of merlot. I've become impatient with cursive; my mind outraces my fingers. So bring on the technology revolution! One of these days I might even buy a cell phone!