1) You need to visit more beaches. More diverse beaches. 2) Touchscreens suck. They suck ass. 3) As a reward to myself for editing the novel I bought myself something really stupid. 4) While I've written plenty of shit on laptops (and gotten paid for it), my chosen writing environment is substantially less portable.
Go to with the triple screens, mang. Jelly. Even a double screen set-up at my place would make some of this lit journal stuff that much easier. My brother uses an old manual typewriter for his creative writing and he's said it really changes the way he writes. You can't just delete shit. He says he thinks about what he writes a lot more before he actually puts it down. I showed him this post but he hasn't commented; if he does I'll share because I think he has a less-usual perspective. Of course, it's gotta also be personal attitude: you can't just delete shit you write down on paper, but it doesn't hurt me to cross nearly entire pages out. I suppose with time my brother might find x-ing through his typewritings to have less significance. You know, like shock, or heroin. This is my brain being stuck.
I go between laptop and pen-and-paper. Never pencil. I loathe pencils. Lined paper, always. Have been known to ask waitstaff if I can have the pen they gave me to sign the receipt with when said pen is particularly nice. You know, all that good writerly-obsessive stuff. Used to do a lot more writing with colored ink/pens. Can be fun, can be far too fiddly. I hadn't considered before now how much I enjoy just the physical act of writing.
The third one is technically a "client monitor" which means when I'm using it for work, that's where the video goes. When I'm writing that's where the iTunes visualizer goes. But I've done double screens for more than ten years now. I had a "space ghost story" to write for money some years back set on Alpha Centauri B. One monitor was Final Draft; the other was Celestia locked in orbit around a fictional planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B. I've had the "typewriter of pain" debate several times. Whatever floats your boat. I'd argue that denying yourself the ability to edit is pretty stupid but then I type over 100 WPM and going back the next day and editing stuff down to what I meant rather than what I said has been my writing process for decades. The book, when edited, lost two entire chapters... and 22,000 words. I hate the physical act of writing. My handwriting sucks. My lettering? My lettering is great. But when I trade 15 WPM of chickenscratch for 100WPM of text I get pissed off. Pencils rawk. particularly blackwings.
I've found sometimes when I have an idea I physically want to write it using one medium or another. Usually the hot, quick & fast ideas want the keyboard - but not always. Poetry is of course also much sparser than prose. Easier to jigger on the page. After I spit out a poem it's an immediate dive into editing but it's also different editing than you'd put prose through. I'm anal about fine points. I often blunt or break pencils, and they smudge (lefty here). I expect you will tell me the blackwing is a far superior pencil that holds its point well, doesn't smudge, and won't break, in which case I am defenseless. I strikethrough before erasing so that quality in pencils means nothing to me. Maybe I should do a series of reviews of various writing implements. Anyone have a chisel and hammer? --- I would end up using those tools for different purposes very, very quickly I suspect.
The Blackwing is a remake of the Eberhard Faber Blackwing but it's still a pencil. Pencils have a few assets, though: 1) Shading. Shading with a pen is a bitch. 2) The act of sharpening is a nice ritual. 3) Erasers are way handier than strikethrough. More aesthetically sanitary. And I say that as also a lefty. I think anyone who has any tradition of mechanical drafting appreciates the pencil. Bitchin' lead holders, super-good compasses, powdered eraser, drafting dots, french curves... Pens? Pens are what your assistant uses once you've actually designed the thing. Pens are for acolytes and calligraphers.
I kind of figured that if you were recommending it it had to be The Best Pencil Known To Man that experienced none of the typical Pencil Problems. ;) I actually favor a (preferably one)-line strikethrough when I edit/markup because then I can still see what I've changed, both to and from. I think some teacher made me start doing it that way a long time ago. Erasing is like deleting w/a keyboard, except I can't Ctrl-Z my way out of it. The strikethrough doesn't demonstrate so well in the picture I put up above because that's literally my brain-tires squealing - I should've just walked away from the page - but you know. Sometimes you wanna see how you said it before for a while after you change it. Occasionally I revise a line, go to re-type the poem, and decide I like the original version better. It happens, though I wouldn't necessarily say often. Aesthetically, yes, you should erase over strikethrough. But why not just copy over to a clean sheet at the end if you're worried about how it looks? (Waste of time, I hear ya.) Shading's a very good point. Cross-hatching with a pen doesn't even begin to cut it.
I have had it for exactly ten minutes. I am now typing the first thing I've typed on it. Initial impressions: Holy shit, even the quiet ones are fucking loud. I've forgotten the power of the IBM-style keyboard. Also, it's gonna take me a while to figure out where my function keys are. But it feels much nicer than the chicklet keyboard, although I can tell I'm working harder. Bug me again in a week or two. It's gonna take some O-rings to shut it the fuck up, and I'm gonna need to route out the desk in order to make it lie properly, but that's been on the agenda for a while.