I
t has come to my attention
that the piece of literary
detritus you are now perus-
ing marks my eighth consecutive
article in this fine publication.
Such an anniversary deserves
some celebration methinks. If
a fiftieth anniversary is repre-
sented by a diamond, what's the
eighth anniversary? Aluminum
foil one assumes.
In any event, I thought it might
interest you, my dear and
long-suffering readers, to discov-
er how I go about penning the
literary effluent that I so merci-
lessly inflict on an unsuspecting
public on a regular basis. As a
child of the information technol-
ogy boom, I think I can justify
such distasteful navel-gazing
scrutiny by stating that this essay
could not have been composed,
proof-read and electronically
dispatched to the lovely and tal-
ented badass ladies who publish
this fine compendium without
the help of the kind of techno-
logical splendour which people
claim they abominate as much as
Kurt Vonnegut abhors a semico-
lon.
My process for creating these
essays begins long before I even
touch the pencil or keyboard.
The initial ideas come from be-
ing present in the world around
me. Occasionally an article on
the internet will grab my atten-
tion, and I'll make a note of it,
but often it's the little details
of life that reveal themselves.
They are, after all, the things
that matter. At that moment, the
writing process truly begins. I
allow my subconscious to ponder
the idea, often over several days.
By the time I sit down to pencil
and paper, the essay has largely
been "written." It simply remains
for me to turn my thoughts into
words.
The first draft of my work is
always crafted on a thin sheet of
wood pulp by scraping it gently
with a wood-encased cylinder of
graphite. You may find it odd or
even eccentric to discover that
I use such archaic methods as
pencil and paper to write near-
ly everything you see online.
There's an honesty, even a degree
of intimacy to the soft touch of a
pencil across paper. It feels more
tactile, more connected some-
how. Working on a computer,
while efficient, brings a degree of
existential dislocation that I find
vaguely disconcerting, at least in
the early stages.
Let me opine a little about my
"rig," as people far more sanguine
than I would say. The device
upon which I commit nearly all
my crimes against language is a
MacBook Air, located here in my
office, more colloquially known
as "the bedroom," though
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