As you may have surmised from the title, recently I have begun messing around with a good ol’ fashioned typewriter. This thing has been sitting here in my office for years - a used offering from my parents, who could no longer fathom any need for it - and although planning on firing it up for eons, I’ve always felt the perfect project had to present itself first. In the back of my mind I kind of knew that it would only feel right if matched to a project based back in the pre-internet era, but as I wasn’t currently working on one, the typewriter continued to sit dormant.

Well, here in the past year or so, I’ve been mucking around with some older family history. Recently, this tidy little episode from the early 90s popped into my head, and let’s just say something clicked. I knew that this was the perfect starting point for my ultra-ambitious new project.

Because it’s only been at most two months since a totally separate yet somewhat connected thought crept into my brain, at which point I’ve become so enamored by it that I couldn’t wait to get cracking. The big idea now is to not just peck out these stories on the typewriter, but to film the work in progress as it’s rolling out of the machine. And now that this thought’s occurred to me, I can’t explain it, but it just feels right, like pieces snapping into the place, in a way that only seems to happen with the projects I’m most excited about.

Even so, it’s taken surprisingly long to even get all the pieces into reasonable place. Maybe at some point I’ll post pictures of my hilariously self-constructed rig. Surely there are fancier setups available out there, but searching online for professional photography equipment seemed like cheating, not to mention coloring outside the lines of this mostly old school experiment.

Well, the first half of this relatively small first episode is now complete. I have no idea if anyone will find this as interesting as I do. But suspect I would keep clanking away at it even if nobody ever read/watched these things. Here’s the Youtube version of the debut installment, if you have a gnawing curiosity about such, which I’m naturally hoping is the case. Introduced by a short speech from yours truly, as I explain my motivations supporting this experiment:

As you’re absorbing this latest burst of lunacy, here are meanwhile some random accompanying thoughts about the process:

-this is just the first half of this story because, to say the least, this is taking a whole lot longer than anticipated. It took an hour and a half of typing just to knock out these three (almost) complete pages. Which was nothing compared to the week spent editing out all the stops and starts.

-a huge chunk of this time wastage went to sorting out this machine’s quarks. Of course there is a manual but of course I couldn’t be bothered to read the thing before leaping right into this madness. Though I would safely label this a somewhat ancient, analog-ish typewriter, dating well before everyone had laptops and smart phones, it’s actually more what you might term a 2.0 era machine, i.e. it does have some electronic features. Yet not exactly a word processor, either. One such feature is this wacky “autocorrect” function I couldn’t quite seem to get a handle on, even after breaking down and looking up that section of the manual. Maybe I’m crazy, but even after brushing up on this point, it seemed to work correctly half the time, not at all the other half.

-which led to my first big break of the day, a sojourn to the nearest dollar store to pick up some correction tape. The irony of this fully completed loop did not escape me, leading to quiet, throaty chuckles, even if I’m the only person who could possibly comprehend their meaning: three books ago, I was ripping on people who still used White Out. I guess it’s kind of like that U2 song where they’re saying that which you mock will surely overtake you (then again, a few albums before that, I believe Bono was singing that if you mock the devil, he will flee from thee. So I’m a little murky on how this concept works, exactly).

-if catching a mistake in the moment, I would stop and correct it with the white-out tape. Otherwise, it wasn’t happenin’.

-it’s fascinating how quickly you can subconsciously adapt to the rhythms of whatever machine you’re using, and learn to work around its shortcomings, be that a car, a bandsaw, or yes even a clunky old typewriter. I learned fairly early on that the letters didn’t repeat so well, in particular the O. It only took a couple of loks that should have been looks before I had already trained myself to slow down and make sure those double hits were landing, because stopping the video, rolling out the paper, correcting the mistake, and reinserting the page before restarting the video was turning into a brutal time-killer.

-I figured out how to turn on an auto return function at some point, but even this has its limitations. If nearing the end of a line, hitting the space or the dash will send the carriage down and over to the next. But if you happen to be in the middle of a long word when smashing into that brick wall, then you’re stuck in no-man’s land. There’s nothing left to do at this point but hand-write in a dash later, maybe, after you finish the word on the next line. Or else bust out the white-out, or else say “eh, good enough,” and forget about it.

-as a result, I found myself often substituting shorter words than originally intended, as time went on. This gave me greater flexibility when nearing the end of a line, but also led to less errors in general, anyway.

-I never did figure out what all these mysterious beeps were supposed to indicate, although it’s certainly possible that doing so would (at the very least) solve this end-of-line quandary.

-after a while, I got to where in a couple instances I could type for about three minutes straight without a single error, which, let me tell you, felt like an epic achievement.

-a couple pages into this, the light bulb finally went off about trying to remove that plastic shield, which vastly improved the readability for any potential viewers - and myself, analyzing the work in progress as I went. Needless to say, I’ll be doing this 100% of the time in future installments.

Now that this trial run is out of the way, I’m not sure if I feel more “connected” to the piece, which is one of the benefits extolled by mostly older authors who still type or even longhand their first drafts. But I would say it has already made me much more deliberate about my choices, whereas when using a computer, you’re just hammering away at warp speed because it doesn’t matter and you can easily cut, paste, edit, find and replace words, spell check, grammar check, whatever, at a later date. The whole experience does have a warmth to it overall, though, a nicely human touch, which I guess was the entire point, and why this feels so right, in this age where coldly mechanical processes and, even worse, AI generated slop threaten to overtake the landscape.

Well, anyway, I ‘m curious to hear your thoughts and any recommendations revolving around this concept. For those of you would prefer reading the piece in much more “normal” form, meanwhile, I have indeed uploaded it for your online perusal. If so just click the image below:

kindly check out my other projects as well!

Official website:

Love Letter To Columbus:

Amazon page: