One of the enduring images I have in my mind's eye of a writer is that of the great Rudyard Kipling, banging away on a manual typewriter, the tap-tap-tap of the keys audible through an open window somewhere in Lahore as he wrote the great Kim over a century ago now.
Of course, I have no idea whether he wrote Kim in Lahore, which was then part of India, but it really doesn't matter. The point is that the idea of him at work captured my imagination, sometime at a much younger age, and it motivates me still.
I've never published a novel, or even a short story, under my real name, but I have written articles and books (some on manual typewriters) in the tropics. I've written in India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tahiti, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Tahiti, among other places.
But my best writing (fiction and non-fiction) came at Sanibel Island, off the Gulf Coast of Florida.
Lately, I have been revisiting some of that material, trying to craft a novel, or at least a series of stories, out of the stuff I produced (on an old manual typewriter I still possess) in our family cottages on the island.
I've posted some of that work earlier here ("Tidelines") but the writing continues, often at night, here in a place no one would call tropical, though given the strange weather patterns we are enduring plus global warming, who knows?
The tap-tap-tap now is on a keyboard, and represents an interactive opportunity for me to share it with you, dear visitor, which I will try to do as soon as the next few chapters reveal themselves to me, their measly vessel.
-30-
No comments:
Post a Comment