In the beginning was the void, for there were no computers, and I wanted one badly. Then out of the void came Atari, and Tandy, and KayPro, but I couldn’t afford them.

Then the nascent mind of Microsoft was grafted onto the body of the old giant IBM, and the others were cast into outer darkness. (Vaporware had a lot to do with that, too, but since I don’t want to get sued, you didn’t hear it from me.)

Then the Woman ate the Apple, put on her running shorts and raced through the auditorium carrying a big hammer, and Mac was born.

About that same time I realized that if I kept writing full time, I was going to starve to death. I had written Spirit Deer, Jandrax, A Fond Farewell to Dying, multiple versions of Valley of the Menhir, and an early version of Cyan. I had shoved about 6000 sheets of paper through the old typewriter. I had two novels published by major publishers in America and one in Europe, and I wasn’t making enough to pay the rent.

I went back for my teaching credential. I worked a year at half salary, just before that became an illegal employment practice, then I got my first full paycheck in years. My colleagues were complaining about how little teachers were paid, but I thought I was rich.

After a couple of years of patching up the holes in my bank account, I finally bought a Mac SE. I may be prejudiced by first love, but I think that was the first “real” computer. The Mac graphic interface was already the ultimate game changer, and the SE was the first Mac with an internal hard drive. The practical advantages of that cannot be overstated.

The computer changed everything. It didn’t make writing easy, but it made re-writing easy. I still write multiple drafts, but I only type a small fraction as many words. I correct, rearrange, tweak, amplify and delete, but I never have to retype a complete page again. And again. And again.

Two things happened about the time computers took over writing. The average length of paperback novels doubled. And suddenly, everybody was writing.

There has to be a connection.

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT. If you read A Writing Life without also following Serials, you may not realize that To Go Not Gently, the novella from Galaxy which is an excerpt from A Fond Farewell to Dying, begins today in Serials. Check it out.

In the beginning was the void, for there were no computers, and I wanted one badly.

When I was in the Navy, before I had any intention of writing novels, there was a time when I thought writing non-fiction articles and books might be a good way to pick up a little side money. I began with a book on woodworking projects. I still have the prototypes I designed and built, but the book went nowhere. I did sell two articles, one on ”A Basic Toolkit for the Home,” for Woman’s Day, and one on bicycle camping to Travel and Leisure.

I used the money to buy a Smith Corona electric typewriter and retired the portable manual I had used through high school and college. Three years later, just out of the University of Chicago, I was ready to write novels. (see 2. Turn Left at Chicago and 3. It was 40 YearsAgo Today)

Those were good days. Writing was a joy and selling had not yet turned sour. My cat China Blue spent his time draped around my shoulders. Leonard Cohen, on vinyl, kept my mood carefully balanced between ecstasy and depression, as only he can. I had a head full of characters, images, and ideas, and time to write them.

Unfortunately, my fingers spent most of their time arguing about who was going to go first, which doesn’t make for smooth typing. In high school typing class I used to brag that my speed was sixty mistakes a minute.

There are so many conceptual and artistic errors in any first draft that fumble-fingered typing is not a real issue. Eventually, however, you get to the final draft.

I couldn’t afford a professional typist and the correction technology of the day was crude. My TYPEWRITER had a function that allowed me to BACKSPACE and shift to a white RIBBON which would OVERSTRIKE the previous letter, if the paper had not shifted on the PLATEN. If you recognize those words, you are of my generation and you have my sympathy.

I didn’t just want a computer, I needed one.

More next post.

Earth’s inclination causes our seasons. It would be hard to find a more ordinary fact, or one less valued. Yet everything about the Earth derives from that inclination, even our religions and our philosophy . . .

Those are the words of Gus Leinhoff from the upcoming novel Cyan.

I like axial tilt as a means of individuating planets, so much so that I have run the bases, hitting all the possible extremes. Cyan, the planet from the novel coming out in January, has no axial tilt and no seasons; Stormking, around Sirius in the as yet unwritten sequel Dreamsinger, lies back at a Uranian inclination and has seasons you wouldn’t believe. Harmony, from the novel Jandrax has a tilt of 32 degrees resulting in heavy glaciation with a narrow habitable band around the equator; it has two summers and two winters each year.

So does Earth – at the equator.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that. One of the great pleasures of world building is finding things you should have realized, but missed. This is one of them.

Let’s imagine the changing tilt of the Earth as the seasons progress. Of course I know the tilt doesn’t change; it only appears to do so from an earthbound perspective. But twenty-seven years of teaching science to middle schoolers has taught me that casual language gets the message across better than an excess of formality.

Today is the equinox, autumnal in San Francisco, vernal in Sydney. The sun lies above the equator at noon, and will (seem to) move southward in the coming weeks. I won’t waste your time telling you what you already know, but consider what you know from a new perspective.

Today at the equator the sun is overhead (call it summer) and for the next three months it will move southward until it gets as low and ineffective as it will ever be (the equivalent of winter), then it will come north for three months until it is overhead again (summer), and continue northward to its other lowest position (winter again), and so forth. Two “summers”; two “winters”.

Earth’s dual seasonality is masked by local conditions, at least in its oceanic regions. The world in the novel Jandrax has a stronger tilt and its oceans are tied up in glaciation. The refugees naturally settle at the equator, where summer and winter really do come twice a year.

Here is a story so old that I have no idea where it originated. A group of Irishmen were sitting in a bar, solving the world’s problems. One of them asked the rest, “If a cataclysm were to destroy all the poets in Ireland, how many generations would it take to replace them?” One of the others simply held up his hand with a single finger raised. (If you know the origin of this, let me know.)

You will note that this is not an ethnic joke, but a comment on how the Irish view themselves. It is also true – and not only about Irish poets, but about any of those human traits that lie latent in all of us until circumstances call them forth.

That includes the capacity for religious controversy.

Before Martin Luther made his opinions stick, there was a long history of dissent within the Catholic Church. Dissenters were called heretics, and they were usually burned at the stake. Look up Jan Hus (AKA John Huss). Once Luther opened the floodgates, here came Zwingli, Calvin, Knox, and good old Henry VIII with his political and personal agenda.

Quakers, Shakers, Anabaptists, Methodists – you get the picture. As someone once misquoted scripture, “Wherever two or three of ye are gathered together, there will be a fight.”

When I needed a religion for my first science fiction novel Jandrax – available battered and cheap in used bookstores everywhere – I came upon Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces. I read the introduction, saw the notion of the monomyth, and the entire religion I needed exploded in my mind, complete in a heartbeat. I closed the book and never went back to it, not wanting to dilute the purity of that flash of inspiration.

Some hundreds of years in the future, Louis Dumezil, a scholar with a self-imposed mission of peace, collates all the world’s religions, winnowing out the common core, and setting it down in his Monomythos. His hope is that a common religion for all men, carved out of mankind’s various faiths, will bring an end to sectarian fighting. Fat chance. In fact, Dumezil unwittingly sabotages his own work by coming out with later, updated editions of his Monomythos.

You can guess the result. His initial success at setting up a pan-human religion based on the Monomythos breaks down into warring sects killing each other over which Monomythos is the correct one.

In Jandrax, the title character is a disillusioned former zealot who lost his religion in the sectarian fighting on Hallam’s world, and now finds himself marooned on an unexplored planet with a shipload of purists.

This week’s posts will come on Tuesday through Friday, to match up a post scheduled for the equinox.

Across the way in Serial, today is the first post on the short story Into the Storm.

It’s the oldest joke on the subject of language – “If I can’t spell the word, how can I look it up in the dictionary?”

People don’t realize that the joke could read – “If I can’t pronounce the word, how is a dictionary going to help?”

Here are two vowels, followed by their example words, followed by their pronunciations, as given by the Pronunciation Guide to the Oxford Dictionary. (URL below)

i        sit        /sit/
e       ten      /ten/

Just like the dictionaries I consulted as a child, this is gibberish.

I pronounce the word “ten” as the Oxford people would pronounce the word “tin”, so this confirms to me that “ten” and “tin” are pronounced the same. Therefore, “often” is pronounced “oftin” – except that teacher said to drop the “t”.

The Oxford Dictionary tells me so, and the southern half of America agrees.

It is the fatal flaw of dictionary pronunciation guides that they must refer back to previous knowledge. Linguists use complex and difficult systems independent of the user’s native tongue, but they do nothing for a fifth grader who goes to the dictionary to learn to talk better.

Let’s see what the Oxford people say about the letter “r”:

“The symbol (r) indicates that British pronunciation will have /r/ only if a vowel sound follows directly at the beginning of the next word, as in far away; otherwise the /r/ is omitted. For American English, all the /r/ sounds should be pronounced.

Of course, this does not include Boston, where all the “r”s that should have been pronounced elsewhere are saved up and put into words that don’t need them.

The fact is, America does not have just two dialects, Southern and normal; or as my people would say, Northern and normal. America has many dialects, and it should. Britain had many dialects, and their speakers migrated to different parts of America, including one non-dominant English dialect that ended up in the Boston area.

PBS documented this in 1986 in a nine-part series The Story of English, which I recommend highly to those who find a copy and a VHS player to play it on.

Meanwhile, if a kid from Savannah and a kid from Boston meet in the home of a kid from Seattle, it might as well be the United Nations. And a dictionary won’t help.

oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/about/pronunciation_english