Typewriter

During my junior high years I was convinced that I could write a novel. I was further convinced that all novelists wrote using typewriters. So I bought a (barely portable) Remington Quiet Writer 11 from Zales Jewelry for $149.50 or so. I bought it on time with my dad’s approval and cosignature. Probably learning to buy on credit was a bad idea.

I used my mom’s high school typing book to teach myself to type. I only got the letters and punctuation on the three main rows. I never added the numbers and symbols to my repertoire.

Never really got going on the novel, but I used the typewriter throughout high school, college and my early professional life. Probably the biggest benefit of learning to type was that I have relatively good keyboarding skills that have kept me going for the last 40 years or so in the personal computer age.

My novel writing urges never really abated and in the late 80s they resurfaced. At the time I was working for Shell Oil Company. This job was pretty amazing in that it was really a 40 hour a week job with relatively few late nights or weekends. I had spare time.

In that time we were members of Pecan Grove Country Club and I played a lot of golf. I would get off work at 4:30, be on the tee box by 5:00 and walk 18 or 27 holes before dark. Worked hard to get my handicap into single digits.

With this spare time I signed up for a novel writing course at the Rice extended education facility. Did about a year and a half under the tutelage of Venkatesh Kulkarni.

He was great. He truly loved teaching. He could be brutal and sarcastic in his criticism so we strived for the occasional check mark or ‘well done’.

I got pretty good starts on a couple of novels and then life intervened. The intervention was leaving Shell and joining DMC - more on all of this later.