Writing up hill, both ways, and that was just the start...

[kinzel]

As I'm going over a candidate script-splinter for Splinter Universe I'm brought to recall something today's young kid writers never had to go through -- printing the final draft of a novel on a 9-pin printer.

With Agent of Change, that meant we had to set the Star 9-pin on doublestrike, and stay awake for the entire 21 hours it took. The paper was a continuous form-fed, ribbon of super-fine bright white paper, expensive as all get out ... and it what it produced was a thick pile of paper that wasn't the real final draft.

By that I mean, once that ribbon of paper was collected -- sometime after we'd mollified the neighbors who'd also heard the 9 pin printer double-striking through the night ... we had to check the entire lot of 500 or so page for slippage, and burst it.

Never had to burst a manuscript? Well, see, in those days the paper had the paper feed-wheel edges that had to be carefully pulled off -- and then each sheet of paper had ot be parted from the neighbors, being reasonably careful not to tear them badly.  The cats loved tearing the side panels off, because if you did it right (with a novel manuscript) you could have a pair of paper snakes, each 400 or so feet long, for them to play in.

Yes, the fine or super finer perfs were supposed to make that .... effortless. Ayuh, kind in the way that taking a tree and making it into a cord of wood is effortless while you're sitting in front of a roaring fire. And you couldn't forget to have Band-aids and cotton swabs and antiseptic nearby, because paper cuts were endemic to the process. ...

Then just when you had a big lump of burst manuscript ... you weren't done -- because *then* you went to the copy shop and had the whole thing copied twice, at 97%, so the letter bled together better. If you were lucky, the copy shop had a box your script would fit in....

After that, you went to the PO and made their day.

All I'm thinking of this because? Because some of these pages I'm reading are still on the off-color, partial-burst original draft paper, where the edges have been taken off but the paper is still attached top-and-bottom. Ah -- yep, we wrote up hill both ways in those days, and when I was doing freelance newspaper work I wrote uphill both ways all night long, had to burst the stuff, and then get in the car to hand-deliver it!

For Splinter Universe, I'll scan this, edit on screen, and drop it into a template for the Wordpress page.

We've come a long way, baby!

Comments

[seawasp]

Is this where I tell you how you punks had it easy, and how you had to re-type the manuscript manually, on a physical typewriter, if you'd made a mistake?

Or were you just not mentioning that because it would be too unbelievable?

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

Did we ever tell you the story about typing the last pages of the final draft of Agent of Change on a typewriter that was (literally) on fire? Excitement!

And a good thing I was a super-fast typist.

...also stupid.

[trolleypup.livejournal.com]

Never did manuscript printing, but did a monthly billing of a thousand plus pages...either two passes OR with NCR paper. The NCR paper had a bad habit of not refolding into the output box, so, more than once, I came in in the morning to an absolute mountain of unfanfolded output paper with hundred page nuggets of refolded paper interspersed. I usually handled the bursting and separating (if NCR), but others had the joy of folding and stuffing.

On the whole I preferred the coarse perf paper for more reliable if also more effortful bursting.

Eventually we went to laser printing, first with a cheapo printer the owner (over my protests) thought would be good enough (the input tray held about 200 sheets of paper, for one!) then with a proper business quality printer (after the cheapo died after a 3000 page run).

I will note that I *never* had a mishap with a toner cartridge, but the owner's pet manager did.

Also...the reek of NCR after a night of printing!

Sometimes it was just worth it to come back to the office after the opera and catch the mid-night NCR printer problems while napping, rather than having to listen to the printer in the morning if it jammed.

[kinzel.livejournal.com]

Sorry -- been there, done that. Used to have to type on a non-electric typewriter, too. One of my joys while i was in college and a little after was going to Roger Zelazny's house and unjamming the "laptop" portables he preferred to the pod of Selectrics in the basement.

[seabat4.livejournal.com]

I think I remember His Story being in the back of the book...

Cathy

[chris huning (by livejournal.com)]

Like Steve Perry likes to say "Welcome to the future!" :)

[seawasp]

How exactly did you manage to set the typewriter on fire? Or was this one of those new-fangled electrical gizmos?

[seawasp]

Well, yeah, I was talking about manuals. Electric typewriters made it too easy. Ahh, the heady joys of trying to separate two of the key actions that had jammed simply because physical law prevented them from occupying the same place at (nearly) the same time. And getting ink all over you from the ribbon.

[grassrose.livejournal.com]

since you were, I take it, still somewhere up north in those days, you could legitimately add "in the SNOW!" to your tale :o)

[kinzel.livejournal.com]

We lived in Maryland, which to some folks is up north -- but we'd already got out first Kaypro computers before we moved north, and our first Star 9 pins, too --

Steve