Paper or Computer?

Happy 4th of July to everyone!  I'm a little late getting that out.  My question to you all today is do you use paper for your writing or your computer?  The other gals who are using Weisner's book to write their first draft in 30 days all tell me how wonderful it is to use the computer for their writing.  So I decided to give that a try.  I've always been a person who likes the feel of a pen in my hand and that notebook on my lap.  I finally set up my laptop (which was bought for me strictly for my writing) and got to work.  I've tried copying and pasting and making spreadsheets and you name it to no avail.  Everything I try has to be deleted because it simply won't work. 

I sat down a few days ago and started working on a rewrite of my first chapter.  I decided I would put it on the laptop then put it on a disc, bring it in to the desktop computer and print it out.  I love having that hard copy in my hand and folder and wherever else it might end up.  I worked all day and got the first chapter rewritten and saved on my laptop.  Today I decided to print it out and start getting my hard copy into files.  After trying for over two hours to get it from the computer onto the disc, I called our son and asked him how to do it.  He told me, I wrote it down and went back and tried some more.  Still nothing.  I ended up with some pictures on the disc and nothing else.  I have no idea where those pictures came from.  They were strange ones with elephants on one side of one page, lilies on another and some symbols that I haven't seen before.  So much for that!

My husband cooked supper tonight and I sat at the laptop and hand wrote every word of the first chapter and the two pages I had done of my second chapter.  When supper was ready, he didn't even bother to tell me because he was afraid to interrupt me after listening to me blast that computer with a few choice words all day!  We ate when I got everything written on paper.

I have decided that even though I'm not very good at the computer and I really don't like writing my book on here, I'm still a writer and I will accomplish as much as anyone else. It will just mostly be handwritten!  And that's okay because it takes all kinds of people to be a writer and I'm certainly one of a kind.

Karen Sperra