THE FRANK EXPERIMENT: Writing Old-School For Twenty-Nine Days Straight

GOOD MORNING, CYBERSPACE!

Today is the day, folks! It is March! It is SPRING (at least, it’s sorta kinda beginning to feel like spring? who knows when spring will actually start. I think the weather is currently bipolar)! Which means that February is officially over, and–as promised–thus concludes The Frank Experiment.

If you saw my initial Frank Experiment post, you already know what I’ve been doing for the past 29 days. BUT. If you’re confused, I highly suggest you take a quick little gander at this post, where I explain the whole ordeal in a nice, neat little package, complete with a smol storytime.

However, if you’re busy and just want to get on with things, here’s the tl;dr–I decided to ditch my laptop and write with naught but a typewriter (or, if the typewriter was unavailable at the moment, a notebook) for the entire month of February.

Sounds cool, right? Sounds pretty simple . . . right?

Well. Today we’re going to be talking about how that actually went. . .

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JANUARY WRAP UP — smol writing updates, Harry Potter, and other random life-ishness

good morning, cyberspace!

The first month of 2020 is over, and if I’m being completely honest, part of me feels like I was slightly jipped in the “New Year” department. On January 1st, I woke up with a cold. Then, just when I began to recover from that, I caught the flu.

Queue me sitting on the couch doing nothing for the next three days whilst feeling like death was about to come knocking on my door with his spindly, bony-white knuckles.

However, despite these minor setbacks in my health–which decidedly proved fatal to my productivity–the month of January was still, in it’s own strange, sick little way, a good month! So let’s talk about January!

THE FRANK EXPERIMENT: Introducing Frank

good morning, cyberspace!

FRIDAY, JANUARY 17th, 2020

Exactly one week ago today, I met a typewriter.

He was a beautiful thing, all sharp edges and dusty keys and a mysterious orange goop which clung to his white frame like dried cheese puff powder. He was thick and heavy, with the word OLYMPIA stamped across his front like a badge of honor and a look of extreme shock on his face. (which I’m fairly certain was from having found himself in the back room of a strange little thrift shop without getting broken into a million little pieces, but I digress.)

This was my first impression of Frank, and though I didn’t know how closely intertwined our paths would soon be, I could feel my heart skip a tiny beat just at the mere discovery of him. Here was a typewriter which had clearly seen better days, but which had survived. Here was a machine which, despite all odds, had withstood the test of time.

Here, my friends, was a trooper.

Unfortunately, when I first discovered Frank in that dingy back room, I didn’t even consider the potential of buying him for myself. For one thing, he was an electric (and I am, in the most stubborn of ways, a mechanical typewriter snob [or, shall we say, I was]), and for another, I already had two typewriters at home. I didn’t need a third one. I didn’t have ROOM for a third one. It wouldn’t do to dwell on the impossible, and–in any case–that cheese puff powder was slightly disturbing.

So I left him.

Now let’s fast-forward by precisely one week, shall we?