What drives writers mad

 By Michael Chandos

     Some say creative people are often mad. Their "genius" propels them to wear odd clothing, to stay up late to write, to think of stories involving moron dwarves as a metaphor for Congress.  All true, except this time it was the printer.

     

     Decades ago, writers typed their stories on actual paper with ink-soaked silk ribbons and a complex,  25-40 pound metal machine with keys that required iron fingertips, and writers covered mistakes with white paste and a bunch of X's. You learned tricks to update your already typed manuscripts so you didn't have to retype the Whole-Damn-Thing because of one error. Typists that could perform typing magic to merge printed files were golden. The machines became electrified. Less iron was required in the fingertips, but mostly it just made errors happen faster. Then, some true genius connected a storage device so you could store a clean document after correcting all the errors.  Still, the printer was the same machine as the writer.

     When the computer came to be, printers with pins like hyperactive megalithic stone workers accompanied them. I was impressed with the result, altho it wouldn't pass for acceptable today. I wrote my first non-fiction book on an Amiga computer and a noisy 9-pin printer. And there began the true Demons of error codes and electronic connectivity problems.

     Today, I have a phone, an iPad, two PC laptops, a 27-inch iMac, and a basic PC that all can send files to the inkjet printer. If you look at the print head, the inkjet is a lot like a pin printer from way last Century.

     Writers do most of their work digitally. They email and text stories that have never seen paper to editors. The printer may even be in another room, reachable thru the ether, no wires required. The printer is fast, sometimes in full color.  Yesterday, the printer performed correctly. Today, I sent One Page to the printer so I could work out an editing issue, and the computer said "error". No reason behind the error, no hint on what to check. I tried the one-pager on four computers and got the same error. I am no computer novice, but it took me four hours to stumble across a fix. I deleted the printer in settings and then selected it again as my default printer. It printed fine. There's no reason for the error, I didn't actually reinstall any software. 

     So I guess I'm sane now. I may have to do that same trick with all the other computers, seemingly for no reason. Sane, not Normal.  Normal is just a setting on a washing machine.