Why Write a Romance Novel (Part Three)

It was the Spring of '22, and I'd just rewarded my college-bound, straight-A student with a new Apple Macbook Pro 16 when I began to write. Or rather, I began with a spreadsheet. I learned about "pantsers and plotters" after the fact. Apparently, I am a "plotser"; I plan but write out of sequence, depending on where my mind is on any particular day. I work with spreadsheets at my day job, so I built one which captured the number of chapters I'd planned, the length of each, the main plot points, etc. A microcosm of the new world I'd been building in my mind for years. I transferred every bit of backstory I'd dreamed up, and felt like I was ready to fly.

But I lacked a workstation. I lacked a laptop of my own. Even my desktop Mac Mini was ridiculously out of fashion by the time I'd resolved to write a novel. I'd long since worn out the Windows laptops I'd used as a photojournalist, and hadn't bought a new one for at least 8 years before picking up a Macbook Pro for my daughter. And frankly, I was out of touch with the market. Like any good plotter, I researched, and learned that J.K. Rowling swears by her Apple Macbooks. Many reviewers commented about the durability and feeling of their keyboards, and Ms. Rowling herself wrote of the freedom to "write anywhere and at any time". Surely the author of ten popular fantasy books can't be wrong.

With a little luck and a lot of trepidation, I scored an "open box" Macbook Pro 13; the smallest, lightest M1 variant I could find. I bought it on credit, seeing it as an investment in my future. My wife had doubts. In fact, her actual quote was, "Ha!" when I told her I was writing a novel. Not the inspiration and devotion I'd expected, but probably exactly what I needed to kick my butt into gear.

When the little, aluminum laptop arrived, I fell in love with it immediately. Brilliant design, never gets hot, battery lasts for ages, no spinning hard drive to wear out, comfortable tactile feedback from the keys. Screen as clear as daylight to my old eyes. It was perfect for me. Well, almost. Apple's insistence upon creating their own stand-alone word processor and Microsoft's shift to cloud-based Works applications conspired to make me loathe transferring my nascent book back and forth between MacOS and Windows platforms. In short, I had to be tethered to WiFi in order to write if I didn't want to reformat everything each time I switched from Mac to Windows. So much for writing anywhere or any time. Yes, I can use Apple's in-house word processing app, Pages, but it does strange things, compared to Word or Google Docs, each of which have their own quirks and work-arounds.

I settled on writing in Office365, and started pounding away. I had four chapters complete by the time I got the MB Pro 13, and swiftly zipped through another four. I felt like I was a master, blending in the backstory I'd created as my mind watched my characters' scenes. I spent the next twelve months buried in plots and subplots. When I came up for air the following April and announced I'd "finished the book", I had over one hundred and twenty thousand words.

And all of them were wrong.

Continued in Part Four...