Morgan, your typewriter will probably find you, when the time comes. Like Nevil found me. (And I hope your boss is feeling better after his surgery).

I LOVE Trustee from the Toolroom. It is such an underrated classic. My favourite Shute will probably always be A Town Like Alice, because of the romance and because it was the first of his that I ever read, and because it's probably the reason I write dual-time novels now; but the racism in it, which I always found jarring, stands out even more now, so I do have to mentally compartmentalize a few bits as I read. But Trustee from the Toolroom is such a lovely character study of a quiet, ordinary man who turns out to be anything but ordinary, in the end. I truly love that book.

I know exactly what you mean. I typed the first draft of my very first novel on the self-correcting electric typewriter (can't remember the make) from the museum where I was working back in the late 1980s. I do remember it had a cartridge ribbon, because I used to swap out the ribbon cartridge and use my own for the book, so I wouldn't be using museum supplies for personal purposes :-) It was a lovely machine.

Nevil says hey, Jennifer :-)

Lillian, one of the fun offshoots of all of this for me has been how much I've learned about old typewriters! There are so many different makes and models, all so individual. Does your typewriter have any maker's name on it?

Nevil says hello back!

Pamela, I write by hand sometimes, too (especially in the bathtub, when my characters decide to start talking to each other and I have to grab whatever paper is nearby and try to get their dialogue down before I lose it!). But in general, my thoughts move too quickly for my hand to keep up, and I was fortunate enough to have been able to persuade my guidance counsellor in High School to let me take touch-typing (I was in the Academic stream, typing was in the Business stream, and he didn't think I'd need it, so I had to convince him it might come in useful if I ever had to type an essay at university...). So keyboards are the only way I can (almost) keep pace with my thoughts when the words are coming quickly.

I've never seen a half-electric typewriter! What an intriguing concept. Sounds like the kind of odd thing we would create back in the 80s, though... :-)

Melony, maybe it will come back to you. Susie Benton, from Sourcebooks, also had that exact typewriter (or one very like it), and typing on it at the store brought back a lot of great memories for her.

Hi everyone! Apologies for the delay--I was away at a conference and the Internet there wasn't very reliable. I'm home now, though, and can end the suspense for you... The lie is #1. Although it's true that I do make playlists for my novels and characters (and sometimes share songs from these on my Facebook page on Mondays), I only play the songs when I'm not writing, as a way to get the characters moving. I write in silence. Any kind of noise in the background (other than nature) distracts me, and if I'm not alone in the house I put on headphones playing white noise to block out the other sounds so I can concentrate. So, definitely NO music :) I DO get ideas in the bathtub. Whenever I come to a difficult place in my writing, the first thing I do is to run a hot bath. An hour or so of soaking and my characters inevitably stir and start to talk, and I emerge with scribbled water-spotted pages filled with random bits of dialogue and thoughts for scenes, enough to get my story moving. Why I’m inspired in the bathtub I really don’t know, though I privately suspect that the effects of lying neck-deep in warm water with the white noise of the bathroom fan obscuring outside sound comes fairly close to the experience of lying in an isolation tank – sometimes called a ‘sensory deprivation tank’ – in which most people’s brainwaves slow to a speed known as ‘theta’, the daydreaming state that falls somewhere between relaxed ‘alpha’ and sound-asleep ‘delta’. My creative subconscious, in other words, gets time to play. And I DO write some scenes entirely by hand. Usually because they come to me at inconvenient times, in inconvenient places, when I'm away from my computer and have to scramble to find a pen and something to write on before I lose the scene entirely...or sometimes because I'm in the bathtub (see above) and using a computer would be ill-advised...but either way, I just re-type those scenes into the manuscript and file the original paper copy away in the three-ring binder I use to hold all the bits and pieces for that particular book. So there you are. I think I'm off to take a bath... :)

That used to be me, as well, although I surprised myself a couple of years ago when I went on a cruise and wasn't sick AT ALL. Completely unexpected, because I'm like you--normally it doesn't take much. I can't decide whether to cruise again, to see if I can pull it off a second time, or whether I should simply consider that voyage was charmed.

:-) I haven't come across Bourdaloues yet, but I confess I may still be distracted by the active man-servant...

Rabbit holes are the best.

Sue, my parents actually did take off for a time in a pop-up tent trailer. I had no idea where they were, they would just telephone in every now and then from various campsites. They loved it. Looking around my Very Cluttered house right now, that has a definite appeal :-)

Mary Jo, I kept thinking of your characters while I was reading of her travels...

Claire, I can completely relate. I was reading Nancy Drew and A.A. Milne and Jan Westcott and Charles Dickens, all at the same time. And Spider Man comics, of course :-)