Lately I’ve been working on my “apocalypse story,” which I had started on my computer. But being on my computer leads me to get sucked into things like Facebook and Spider Solitaire and watching movies or TV shows on Hulu while I write, which leads me to NOT write… so I decided to work on it longhand. I realized that I kind of missing my own handwriting. For the first time in a while I found myself writing and thinking, just one more page. I didn’t want to stop!
And then the apocalypse story sowed some seeds in my brain and now I have lots of ideas for it. I love a good dystopia / end of the world story. Every great writer needs to have one, right?
I also wrote a little bit of a very old story (so old I can’t find any of the first draft… I think I may have started it in high school). I didn’t get too far before turning to the apocalypse story. I’ve been writing a lot of “fun” stuff, and this old story would have been fun. A good old-fashioned John Saul / V.C. Andrews-esque teen horror novel… I just wish I had the old drafts! I know I had named all the characters and everything…
Work in Progress 
Yes. Exactly.
When I had a dial-up connection, it was my habit to get offline to write for a few hours, then get back on to check email, eat lunch, jump off again to write.
Now, with high-speed DSL, the proximity of the answers to EVERY question, my three email accounts, FB, Titter, blogger, Bebo, MySpace–and all the other places YA authors need to be to hang with our readers…it is difficult to focus.
My handwriting sucks, but I have been using an alphasmart (can’t get online/word processor built for classroom use) Neo to write lately and am amazed at what I can get done…
I actually deleted my Myspace account… then I joined Twitter… so how much work have I saved myself? I met a writer who uses an old computer with all games deleted to write on, but so far the longhand is serving me well. It’s like a return to my high school days (pre- personal computer). Sometimes I do like my handwriting, although when I get really involved in the story it tends to suffer.
Twitter, for pete’s sake. Not Titter. (((although in the sense of little birds chattering madly, it’s an understandable typo)))
My handwriting is really very bad. And I can’t write even half as fast as I think. So I need a keyboard solution. I see people writing on tablets in parks, on trains,and envy it, but I just can’t. As for Twitter, I only do the novel there. http://russet-one-wing.blogspot.com/
so it is a controlled time sink–and it’s waking up my muse. Always a good thing…