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As a general rule, I don’t like talking about a work in progress.  Especially to non-writer friends.  But yesterday in an email conversation I threw a few bits of a story into the air.  That was a mistake.

“Ooh, steampunk,” my friend said.

“No, it’s not steampunk at all, actually.”

“Well sure it is.”

“No, really, it’s not.”

“What would you call it then?”

“I don’t call it anything, yet. It’s a story. In progress. It doesn’t have a genre. It’s a little extropian, maybe. But just because it has an $ANOMALOUS_OBJECT and an $OBSCURE_HISTORICAL_PERSON in it doesn’t make it steampunk. Just let me write the damn thing, okay?”

“Fine.”

“Good.”

“Just finish it soon, because I really like steampunk.”

Grrr.

Rejection Letter of the Week™:

McSweeney’s. Again.

Ouch.

And it was a damn funny piece, too.

For all my quirky habits, I’m not much of a ritualistic person.  Some things I do repetitively or consistently out of mere habit, but rarely do things procedurally according to any kind of personal tradition.

Having said that, I do have a bit of a custom when it comes to “retiring” a filled notebook and beginning another.  I did this with one of my Moleskines the other day.  The first one in a while, actually; it’s pretty rare when I fill one from cover to cover.  I always have a bunch of them going at a time, some for specific projects and others lying around for general note-taking and core-dumping.  So more often than not, I’ll abandon them at some point, and they’ll just get stuck on a shelf or tossed in a drawer.

But when I hit the back page of a well-worn Moleskine, it’s fun for me to use that as a reason to grab a fresh one, get it ready, and start filling it with ink.

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This morning I listened to the latest episode of The Talk Show¹, wherein our hosts discuss Apple Keyboards.  Specifically, the Undisputed Best and Most Wonderful Input Device Ever: the Apple Extended Keyboard II.

I used that model for years, from my Mac IIci right up until the time I got my first Mac with USB inputs (an original blue and white G3, maybe? I don’t remember for sure).  Every Mac I’ve owned since then has come with its own keyboard², which I’ve used, with varying degrees of pleasure and productivity.

I’ll admit that I never paid too much attention to the quality of the keyboards I was using.  Well, probably I did, because I sure bitched a lot about some of them.  But I never actually did anything about it until fairly recently.

When I got my first metal-cased Powerbook, I fell in love with the keyboard.  It fit my hands just right, it gave just enough tactile feedback without being too “clicky” on one end or too squishy on the other.  By the time I upgraded last year to a new MacBook Pro, I was doing most of my work on the portable machine and not doing as much on the Mac Pro in my office, mainly because I was much more productive on the keyboard of the laptop.  I tried replacing the stock Mac Pro keyboard — with its huge chunky finger-numbing keys — with a couple of models that seemed similar to the tactile characteristics of my laptop, but never found one I really liked.  I tried a MacAlly, and I think maybe a Kensington, but neither really did the trick.  They had function keys in weird places, and one of them didn’t have any USB inputs on it.  Besides, they were just butt ugly³.

Then one day I was tooling around in the Apple Store, and started typing on one of the new aluminum extended keyboards.  Wow.  It’s not perfect, but it’s the closest thing to the feel of typing on my laptop.  I walked out of the store with one, and now I can shift work between the laptop and desktop and not have that jarring feel from switching keyboards.

During the podcast, John and Dan mention that they would be happy to buy any new or new-ish Apple Extended Keyboard II’s that we might have lying around.  I remembered that I do in fact have one, in its original box, and barely used.  I bought it right before I got a G3 years ago, and it’s just sitting in storage.  At first I thought of offering it up to them, but I might just try using it again.