So my fabulous writing group (of one) pointed out to me that I really needed to do research on jesters.  Actually, what she said was that I must have done research, but it didn’t come through.  Sorry!  So she shamed me into it, pretty much.  Because I haven’t really done any.  Which is surprising, considering how much I like doing research.  I mean, I really dig it.  I remember back when I was a wee lass and went to the library for the first time and was taught about those huge, olive green index books of magazine articles.  I swear, it felt just like finding the hidden treasure.  Find the proper book for your topic, find the proper article, write down the name and secret number, give it to the librarian.  Librarian disappears into the bowels of the library, communes with the oracle, and comes back with the exact article you need.  If you’re lucky, it’s on micro-fiche and you get to go into the magic room where it’s turned into a legible copy of an old magazine.  That’s some serious satisfaction.

I suppose I should be a little more irritated by how easy the Internet makes things these days, if that’s what I loved about doing research.  Got a question?  Just ask Google.  Google will defer to Wikipedia and three seconds later you have your answer.  No olive green tomes, no librarian, no oracle, and the answer may or may not be right (because, after all, it’s Wikipedia) but you have your answer.  Like now, for example.  Listening to Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” and she mentions Sister Sadie.  OK.  Who’s Sister Sadie?  I’ve heard the name before.  Hell, I even had a tall black guy in a trench coat call me that one day when I was walking outside my old apartment on Morrison.  “Damn, girl, you look just like Sister Sadie!”  What does that mean?  What does Sister Sadie look like?  Was it a compliment?

But I digress.  Point being, I can just go to Google right now and find out all about Sister Sadie and Nina Simone.  No mystery, no wondering, no speculating…  BUT there are moments of satisfaction.  Where research takes a bit more effort than I thought it would.  One of the books I’d like to read is by Robert Armin, one of Lord Chamberlain’s Men who apparently took the role of the fool in Shakespeare’s plays and turned it from funny servant to court wit, and he wrote an advice book back in 1608.  Fabulous!  I’d love to read that.  And with the Internet so handy, I’ll just Google it and…  Oh wait.  So nothing on Amazon.  Nothing on Alibris.  Nothing, nothing, nothing.  But hold on.  There’s one copy somewhere in Rhode Island for sale on Tom Folio for…oh, let’s see.  Fifty dollars!?!  And that’s not counting shipping and handling, of course.  Well, I’ll bookmark that page and continuing looking.  And then I find one at a library.  Perfect!  They have a program where I can check out the book and they’ll mail it to me and….are you kidding?  The library is in Canberra.  That’s right.  Canberra.  As in Australia.  Seriously a WTF moment.  They won’t send me the book, but they’ll make a copy of it for me and mail it to me for another…oh, around seventy-five dollars.  Really?  Let’s check out one last source…

And this is where the really humorous part comes in.  The last place I check researches all of the libraries in your surrounding area.  Top of the list?  That’s right.  Reed College.  Reed College library has a copy.  The place where I spent three years cramming in an English degree and have avoided like the plague for ten years has a copy available of the exact book I want.  So now I go consult with the oracle myself.  Establish my identity as an alumna, obtain the mystical ID card that will grant me access to the stacks (God, I do admit–I love the stacks in the Reed College library…), and withdraw the sacred text from its place on the shelf.  Treasure found.

Honestly.  Writing groups have got to be the best thing since…I don’t know.  The invention of the computer?  Which is something my writing group and I were talking about during our first meeting.  To be fair, my writing group is me and one other person so far.  Everyone else is too busy doing other things.  But what an other person she is!  SO good and SO cool.  I gave her about 50,000 words, she had it read and had already called and emailed by the very next day with all these amazing suggestions.  And she managed to make me feel like I actually had something worth working on, rather than just giving a heavy sigh and making recommendations for what I could do to try and fix it if I really wanted to bother with it…   (Which is pretty much what any creative writing class/teacher has always made me feel like.)

But there’s still the embarrassment factor.  Can’t get over that just yet.  It’s SO hard.  Especially when she’s making all of these suggestions for things I feel like I should have already fixed.  For example…  I have a serious problem with the passive voice.  Instead of the show, not tell business, I tell what’s going on with a quick sentence or two so that I can get to the fun dialogue and witty banter.  Hell.  Maybe even that’s not as good as I think it is.  Nevertheless, she’s pointed out all of these other places where I can improve on that.  The real humiliation would come if she ever knew how much of that crap I’ve already fixed.  The whole first few pages used to be one long dissertation by my main character on how she got from the library to her rooms.  Now, at least, I put in some overheard conversations.

And the details of writing.  Just with her suggestions, I already feel like she’s got a better idea of the damn castle than I do.  This is why she’s so good.  I don’t know or remember or even think of doing those little details.  Why don’t I think of that?  What exactly DO I think of when I’m writing?  Hm.  And am I getting any better at it?

My new favorite thing.  Not that I’ve tried it yet or anything, but my husband (of all people) read an article about it in his Wall Street Journal (of all places) and reminded me about it.  I’d heard of the Dvorak keyboard in college, and then promptly forgot about it because, of course, no one uses it.  Or no one did back then.  It’s far better than QWERTY on your wrists, far faster and was designed specifically for touch-typing.  How can it be wrong?  Apparently, there’s all this drama about Dvorak being blacklisted for some reason and the change-over being so difficult because there were hundreds of thousands of typewriters in existence by the time he had invented his system.  Exciting stuff.  Intrigue, drama, maybe even a little Communism.  His name is Eastern European…

After reading myriad websites (and rejecting outright the space-alien-module looking keyboards that take up half of your desk and claim to be ergonomic) I have decided to simply convert my current keyboard and see how it goes.  The general consensus seems to be that one can learn the Dvorak keyboard within a week or two, and have the QWERTY system out of your blood within a month.  We’ll see.  And I’m not certain how beneficial it will be for me, since I’ll still have to know QWERTY for work.  Although I can most likely switch my computer there as well since my boss never uses it anymore.

These two sites are the most useful that I found:

http://dvorak.mwbrooks.com/

http://www.powertyping.com/

The first is extremely informative as far as the actual conversion is concerned.  Computers make it super easy to switch these days.  (Although surprisingly, the ever-intuitive Mac doesn’t allow you to enable it through the Keyboard settings in your System Preferences, but in the International settings.  Who knew?  Made sense once I actually learned how to do it, but I’m so used to figuring out things for myself on my Mac…  Just a side note.  Not really important, but I found it interesting.)  This site even has a free download so that you can convert to just a one-handed version (left OR right) as well.  This is good if you’re working with your mouse a lot.  (Dvorak apparently invented those systems for amputees from the war and one-handed typists can type up to 50-60 WPM.  That’s only 20 words less than I can do now.  The man was clearly brilliant.  Why don’t more people know about this?  Or am I just out of the loop?)

The first site even provides a sheet of labels you can download and recommendations on how to convert your keyboard.  And then, as I mentioned, links to crazy keyboard land.  I’m sure they’re very good for you, but I’m just not ready to go there yet.  I’m still old-school (ish).  It took me forever to stop writing long hand and to teach myself to compose at the computer, and I still miss typing at a typewriter.  I used to have an old Smith-Corona and an even older Underwood and when I was feeling low on inspiration I would make myself a gimlet and type on one of those for a while and suddenly feel like Raymond Chandler.  So baby steps.  I will learn the Dvorak Keyboard first, and then see where I’m at.

The second website is free lessons for learning the keyboard.  I’ll report back on that one.  Who knows?  Next time I could be writing my next post all Dvorak-style.