She thinks that starting up her allotment of writing for today with indenting seems to be

the best way to produce a viable body of work. She scratches her head, is not quite sure if she

uses the word “viable” in the right context, in the right way. She ponders if there even is a right

way or a wrong way in writing. She detests conventions of classifying and cataloguing written

pieces into “genres”, she has no clue whether her own writing is fiction or nonfiction. It might

probably pass as fiction, which kind of puts it down a notch. And on a very prosaic, a very

practical, concrete note her writings will not be published that easily. Her preferred publishing

“houses” would be university presses, giving her work instant stamps of approval. But her

musings lack footnotes, she does not write scholastic treatises, she does not end her writings with

a “works cited” list, she does not use the Chicago Manual or APA- Style citations. She has

trouble in writing because, all she did for the last decade was essay writing for school, proper

scholastic work, so she approaches writing in general as that, a means to inform, a means to

disseminate meaning, to decipher reality, to draw conclusions, to find similarities and

dissimilarities between vastly differing procedures, among differingfields.

She is sitting in the Kwantlen College Learning Center; it is by now July 2008. Summer

came into this city, while she was typing her days away, while she was pecking like a

woodpecker at each and every keyboard she came near to. She just writes, tries not to forget to

save her work, emails it to herself, tries to categorize her files alphabetically and numerically,

tries to save it on disks, writes, writes, writes. Yesterday she started her second book this year,

while the first one is not even finished. It is finished in scribbles on paper, but half of it still waits

to be typed. She tries to type 2 pages per day, diligently, she prints them out, hoards them neatly

on her dining table, sends themout to publishers, ponders whether to get a literary agent. Her life

becomes stale, her only distraction are the differing keyboards all over town, black ones, white

ones, ecru ones. She does not know how to put the accent aigues on her e’s, she foregoes that.

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She grapples with different printers, different soft wares, she moves around this town in search of

the perfect library to sit down and type, type, type. She is not into plots, constructed narratives;

she cannot phantom what other people think about, she prefers to describe this keyboard, more

so than people. Machines are utterly fascinating, who knows how they work, which button

makes them do what. She is very nontechnical, thus she stands in awe in front of all these

machines. Cranes make her gasp for air, lift trucks are smaller dinosaurs than tall cranes. Cities

are fascinating; the RAV line downtown sings its songs. The tunnel boring proceeds. The clock

on the wall is three-thirty; she is totally confused these days. She does not know whether she

should use numerals or words in writing, should she write plus or +, @ or at, British or American

spelling. Should she write Vienna or Wien, the local term or the British term, should she write

Rue Ste Catherine or St Catherine Street? Should she be consistent, capitalize Kingston all

through her text, or write Kingston once and kingston the next time. Should she play by the rules

or decidedly use erratic orthography, trying to liven up her prose with linguistic hiccups. These

are the things she thinks about these days in this hot Vancouver summer, sometime after the end

of Junuary; these are the things she ponders. She never thinks and always ponders. She misses

structure, and writes away all day long. Each and every day, without blueprint, sans rules. She

has to stop to make sure that she can impose some kind of coherence on her prose, a leaning

towards grammatical conformity, with hiccups in between that make for the fabric of good

poetry. She paints with words; the language is conte, chalk and pigment, clear brushstrokes and

eloquent lines. She halts her writing to inhale her surroundings, this busily typingey place. Where

suburbia stops and individualism starts, where research and innovation still have a chance, in this

conform lab, where poets sing to their keyboards. Where pathos lives, where self doubt rules,

where words splash on to the monitors, where the Xerox machines spit out the lively, the very

organic word constructions of each and every one of us here. Where pages are waiting to be

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filled with halted and d suspended dreams, whatever that means. Where accuracy has to wait,

where words hook into each other to form a beautiful chain. Make that “aesthetically pleasing”

chain.

She cannot find the icon for the word count; this software is too complicated, too new.

She is at the mercy of all these technical advances, her craft is under attack, she has to obey the

spell check, and thus she cannot dance freely and virtuously over the page, she does not see and

hear birds singing, no inspiring nature dictates poetry to her, only a sliver of green as seen

through the thick curtain, in this lab the air conditioner is the music. People talk in a language

she cannot decipher, that is the music, and the hammering of the buttons of the keyboard further

her words, force her writing forward, make her articulate meaning, semi conscious stabs at

illustrating reality. She can see the beige brown brick wall outside; she tries to figure out what to

write about the wall. If this was a painting she could describe it, ad nauseum, filling page after

page with a description of rectangular stone pieces. Dissertations about brick walls,

structuralism, post structuralism, deconstructivism, maybe disintegration of the writer’s life. She

ponders how many more words she should hammer down, where is the bloody word count.

Yesterday she wrote seven and a half pages, today, three; this is not a good story. Just a story of

someone who writes away, who sits in front of a typewriter, who plays with words , who runs

after accurate descriptions of reality, who does not know if this is a keyboard a typewriter a

computer, someone who loses her ability to spell, to type, to concentrate, someone who is

fascinated to leer down at her fingers hammering on the tastature, who scratches her head, looks

at the mouse and the “-icrosoft” writing on it, someone who longs for finding the word counting

button. In July of 08.