The question, as always, is how to begin a story. This question is further complicated by the time-travel genre. One way or another, narrative threads will overlap. A character hurled into the past, intentionally or accidentally, is aware of a future. Some element of the narrative is inherently retrospective, even if that character’s current circumstances…

I finally have taken a bite out of the apple. I bought an iPhone XR, betraying my commitment to simplified tech. I had several reasons for doing so: 1) Wifi connections are too unreliable at RV parks, where I shall be doing work for Cold Hard Type this summer; 2) I now can do work…

A call for submissions is going out for stories, poems, and art for Cold Hard Type’s third book: Backspaces. The theme is devoted to time travel. Each submission must tie in typewriters. Fiction and poetry, pending acceptance, must be produced on typewriters for final print. See this link for further details: Backspaces  Image not related…

I have a bad habit of using improper seating and desks for typing. In some cases, I have little choice. The desk and chair in my school office can’t be changed out, which means that the typewriter sits too high when I’m typing. This leads to typos and a lack of good flow in typing….

If you don’t have the time to write a novel in November but have a hankering to do some creative writing, you might like this prompt I used for American Lit. My students are reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, just in time to cheer them up for Thanksgiving. The novel tells a post-nuclear holocaust story…

A friend of mine scored an Olympia stash the other day. He picked up four machines with different type faces. I am particularly envious of his gray SM3, which has a long carriage and is in excellent condition. This SM4, on the other hand, is jamming in the middle of the carriage. I luckily have…

For Charlotte Perkins Gilman