Typing To Avoid Writing

I don’ t know if others ever have this problem, but I have been more than a little enthusiastic when it comes to typing as of late. This typically results in nearly immediate responses to any letters that I receive. In addition, the letters that I write in return often end up being nearly the length of a novel by the time I have finished. While my intentions are good, I often think that i have the same effect on others as the dog that just wants to keep playing fetch long after the person tossing the ball has grown tired of doing so.

Clearly I need to find some other writing projects to keep myself occupied, while also fulfilling my insatiable need to type. The only real problem is that unlike writing letters, most writing tasks tend to be challenging, some of them very much so. I have cranked out the occasional page for One Typed Page, but I do not do so on a daily basis. Of course I could always write more content for this blog, but coming up with typewriter-related content that isn’t exclusively focused on the most recent typewriter purchase can be pretty challenging. (Especially when you don’t have the safety net of a recent typewriter purchase to write about.)

I did write my first ever true fan letter just last month — to the British actor Nicola Walker. This proved to be far more difficult than I ever could have imagined, not due to a lack of things to say, but just the opposite. Though I am very impressed with Ms. Walker’s acting talent, I did not want to gush on and on about this (as would be my normal tendency) . My goal was to keep the letter to a single page while still managing to convey how much I actually admired her work. In the end I was satisfied with the letter I wrote, but I’ll admit that it took me more than a handful of attempts to reach that point.

While I find typing to be easy, the writing can be very challenging at times. one of the reasons that I am writing this blog post is because I am struggling to get started on a potential submission for the Cold Hard Type series, something that I’ve never tried before and fully intended to start last month. As ironic as it might be, I am essentially writing this post so as to delay writing something else. I am taking the easy way out, choosing the lesser of two evils, or whatever else you might call it. At least I am typing, and as has been the case for some time now, that is really what I am feeling the need for. Don’t ask me why, but I am guessing that at least a few of you who end up reading this can understand or at least sympathize.

AFTERTHOUGHTS: My thanks to Ted Munk for his recent encouragement to keep typecasting. Over on his blog To Type, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth…, Ted continually manages to come up with new ways to inform and entertain the typewriter community. One would think that as long as Ted has been involved with typewriters, he would have run out of such things to write about long ago. Yet that never seems to be the case. We can all be thankful for this.