Note
 I’ve been working on and off on a project alternatively called "Asciidoc for Poets and Writers," "Programming for Poets," and currently, "A Short Opinionated Book About Writing on a Computer," and what follows was originally meant for that, but I think, while writing my way through the intended line of argument, I found out that I was wrong, so probably this won’t make it in. Still, I think it’s funny to look back at things I wrote twenty-plus years ago, which is what this little micro-essay ended up being more or less about.

This is a common story you very well may have heard before but here is my version of it:

I am not old but I am old enough to remember a world before the ubiquity of the internet and DSL and I wrote my first "novel" on the Macintosh computer in my fifth grade teacher’s classroom during free time. I don’t remember why or how we had this free time, but I am sure, based on what came later, that I at least kept the "canonical" draft there and on a floppy disk, and I wrote the probably fifteen pages the comprised it (looking now — I found the file — it was 3,714 words, and already I appear to have been pulling in borrowed forms — emails, text messages, etc.) in AppleWorks, which I must have some point converted to .doc files in middle school, as that’s the format I have one version of the file in now.[1] The fixing[title]makebetter! file is still a .cwk.

Aside

In addition to this "novel" I appear to have drawn up a number of lesson plan templates (was I gong to be a teacher?), presentations that I am sure were not for class, as well as some "Writing Tips and Tricks":

Novels

To write a good novel, remember what you want to say, don’t get off the subject. Chose[sic] your word[sic] carefully, and put power into your writing.

Poetry

Writing good poetry is hard. You have to have an idea, and know how to put it into words. Poems should come from the heart, so they will all have a meaning.

I mean, sort of not wrong? Kind of?

It used to be a lot harder to open files if you didn’t have the right program. Now my free, open source copy of LibreOffice will open these AppleWorks files, no sweat. The formatting even looks more or less right, even the bad font choices I made as an eleven-to-twelve year-old are preserved. It used to be that a lot more of our life was "files," hard drives, backups. These days it’s all up in the cloud somewhere or other, all web-based. The company I work for is tired of paying for Microsoft licenses so more or less just uses Google Docs (as we pay for Google already for email and other things). A lot of writers — even the "techie" ones — I know just use Google Docs also, for the convenience. But files, man. Things you could put on a floppy or CD or thumb drive and take from one place to another.

I’m looking less far back but still far enough into middle school and see that nearly all my papers and things were in AppleWorks, or I suppose it must have been iWork by that point. (I bought a white, plastic-shelled Macbook with my bar mitzvah money and it lasted me until I went to college.) It’s nice that LibreOffice will open those files; iWork as-such doesn’t exist anymore, and though the programs that grew out of it — Pages, Numbers, Keynote — are certainly still around, I can’t say that I like them. But that’s mostly due to unfamiliarity, I do admit.

(I’m still skimming through — it looks like I’d gotten a copy of Microsoft Office by the time I was a Junior.)

All these old files — how much memory am I porting around from computer to computer with me, or now storing in an iCloud bucket I pay something like $3 a month to maintain? I mean sometimes it’s valuable: apparently I still have a ripped copy of Now That’s What I Call Music!, Vol. 8 kicking around, although I have no idea how to play .wma (Windows Media Audio) files.

I was planning to make a point about text files being preferable for future-proofing but I suppose, at least until it really all does burn down (at which point we want to ensure we have plenty of printed copies of things), maybe it’s not as big a deal as I want it to be for the sake of my argument to use this or that format: the open source people have won enough that even docx is an open, if garbage and opaque, standard. You can open most things from at least the late 90s now, so why worry? You probably won’t even have to pirate the conversion software.

While I’m sure it was hard for me as a 13- or 14-year old to massage file formats, I’m sure that by iWork 6 or whatever, you could at least read in doc files. Export them. Etc.

It provides a kind of nostalgia, too, I’m realizing. Thinking about those programs as I type this now into vim makes me wonder if I really have progressed or if this is not a step backward. I mean, I can’t really make the font Papyrus, can I?[2]

But would I go back? No, because of all of the other reasons I will someday put forth into the book.[3] Fewer distractions, the separation of content and presentation, etc., etc., but it is kind of fun, now that this has become more archaeological than argumentative. But anyway —

1. I have a vague memory of downloading a vaguely sketchy program to perform this conversion, or, possibly, I extracted and then fixed the mangled text.
2. I blame an early trip to see the mummies at a Museum in Chicago and the subsequent Egyptology phase for my apparent enduring love of this font, which I seem to have used nearly everywhere I could.
3. By this point in the writing I knew this was going to be a blog post.