While Waiting to be Published

The Year of A Working Writer (2011)

lisashapter@whilewaitingtobepublished.com (Lisa Shapter) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 19:36:27 GMT

Number of Works Written: 45 short stories, 11 novellas (Some will be revised into novels.)

Total Number of Works Sent out: 59

Number of Stories Sent Out To Pasture, Unpublished in the Current Marketplace: 0

(2 are getting very close to this point.)

Number of Publishers Sent to: 103

Number of Rejection Slips: 210

Number of Works Published: 1 (“No Woman, No Plaything” in Kaleidotrope)

(It went out to 5 publishers over 7 months before getting published.)

Most Rejected Work: “The Hatched Chick” (9 times)

(The direct sequel to “The World in His Throat”, go figure)

This has been a a good year. As I had hoped my publications seem to happen every other year, but I did publish a short story this year. I had a lot of time to write. I finished half of the 74 Stories Project. I learned a lot writing a short story a week (following the advice of Ray Bradbury) and I hope to finish the project within the next 2 years. I joined Codex Writers Group. It's been tremendously helpful for my craft, I've met wonderful people who are fine craftsmen and -women (who know science fiction and all its sub-genres very well), and reading its critique pile is the greatest science fiction magazine on the planet. I always wish I had more time to participate in Codex but my day job began to interfere about a month after I joined and will continue to do so for much of next year.

I also bought (or was given) three typewriters including a Remington model I did not yet have. I wrote a novella during NaNoWriMo on one of those machines and I am currently expanding that novella into a novel. This year I began sending more literary short stories to literary magazines: this resulted in a few "never send us this kind of things again" rejections slips but it also resulted in some slips that were full of warm encouragement even as they said 'not quite'.

My goals for next year include filling out my collection of early Remington typewriters, replacing the drawband on one favorite model (without losing the coiled mainspring which lets the machine to run without electricity), making further progress on the 74 Stories Project and keeping up with the 59 works I already have in circulation with publishers. I hope to finish at least one of the works I started this year and make a more pointed search for a literary agent for my 19 novels. (Only a handful are at representation stage but I would have more time to write and revise if I could delegate some work to a literary agent.)

-Lisa Shapter

Read "No Woman, No Plaything" in Kaleidotrope

NaNoWriMo And Remembering Anne McCaffrey

lisashapter@whilewaitingtobepublished.com (Lisa Shapter) — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 03:49:05 GMT

November is almost over. I’ve been writing continuously for the past 3 days, at least 75 manuscript pages. I ran through an entire fancy ballpoint pen gel ink cartridge. My hand and arm are still tired today even though I’ve finished writing. This year’s National Novel Writing Month novel is done, a mix of handwritten, computer typed and typewritten pages (on the Hermes Rocket seafoam green typewriter.) It was pleasant to do nothing but write (with meal breaks) and it is good to get the story laid out.

This year’s novel started with the fairly dull task of filling in the story between the first 40 stories of the 74 stories project (read the first story in the 2-inch stack of short story manuscripts: write, read the second story: write). A secondary character who felt he had been slighted and misunderstood took the book over and the rest went much more smoothly.

I now have a month’s worth of rejection slips to go through (including one from a publisher who included part of someone else’s story ...) and the rest of the 74 stories project to write. I’m glad NaNoWriMo is over but for a year when I had little time to work with but the first and last week of the month I’m very glad I finished.

Anne McCaffrey died this past week. She was a tremendous influence on me and she was an early example I had of a successful and prolific female author who wrote science fiction and fantasy. (For a sense of her range read Get off the Unicorn.) The earliest book of hers I read was probably The Ship Who Sang, although Dragonflight and Dragonsong followed soon after. I stopped reading her work shortly after Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern/Nerilka's Story. I think the subconscious is essentially subversive (it likes to create contra-narratives and undermine its own earlier creations) but I think McCaffrey could have exercised a stronger hand to retain the quality and continuity of some of her long running serieses (especially Pern). It is adorable that certain medieval setting characters get to learn computer science or were present during the childhoods of other major characters: adorable but full of implications which need to be thought through before hundreds of pages are committed to the idea.

I both admire McCaffrey’s strong female characters and regret that her female villains were all cut from the same cloth. (I also wish that her female characters were not love interests quite so often and that they were not so often defined by the men they partnered with.) So often McCaffrey’s female characters were given a promise of great power only to lean that power could only be assumed along with a relationship to a man: as a young lesbian I kept thinking ‘great, so I have to put up with this guy?’

Generally women with great political stature or professional success can choose their mates and how much to let that person into their decisions: in McCaffrey’s scenarios these men undetachable accessories, they came with and shared the woman’s supreme status. I always like the earliest parts of her books best and I always thought there could be a much more interesting story around ‘wait, this position comes with this person (or these people) – and you have to share power and make decisions with them’.

I like that her earlier works included the possibility of same sex couples (but did not like that they seldom talked about them, outside of the episode in Dragonquest ), and I much prefer the possibility that Jaxom’s foster-father Lytol was gay (his dragon was a green in the earlier versions of the story and even as a teen I noticed the revision and its implications.) I wished her plots did not depend so much on romance and rescue (and I am annoyed when these themes show up in my own work), although I know McCaffrey wrote as a revolt against how female characters were treated in contemporary sf/f. I appreciate that she wrote palatable, unesoteric fiction with great heroines (and ideas that have aged gracefully: science has made it more, not less plausible that a severely disabled adult might pilot a spaceship or run a city.)

I also like how much of her fiction depends on sheer exultation, how she gives her characters moments of ‘how cool is this?’ as they rocket through space or step onto an alien world or fly on the back of a dragon. It is not an easy emotion to evoke and it is not easy to make an ordinary part of a narrator’s life the source for a passage about wonder.

At one point in my life I read everything Anne McCaffrey had written. Her books lead me to Jane Yolen’s Pit Dragon trilogy (starting with Dragon's Blood) and to Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea (start with Wizard of Earthsea.) I already knew about Tolkien’s Middle-earth from The Hobbit but her work lead me to the Tolkien Reader with poems and a story about a dragon to a slew of lousy, lazy children’s fantasy with dragons, and to Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain (it had no dragons but helpful teachers and librarians handed them to me when I ran out of dragon books to read.)

In other words I owe a lot of my sf/f fandom to Anne McCaffrey and it taught me the valuable principle – when I read the Harry Potter books I see a lot of bad Latin, a magical system that needs a few screws tightened, and a lot of easy-to-recognize source materiel. I enjoyed them (and the movies) a great deal but as a long-time reader of fantasy I wrinkled my brow thinking about a whole generation of young readers ... then I remembered that I grew up on Anne McCaffrey and from Anne McCaffrey I ended up reading Beowulf and the Mabinogion (and about Sigurd and the Arthurian legends). Not bad.

Fans of fantasy and science fiction love the innovative, the head-crackingly complex and difficult, the plot one can’t guess from a parsec off – but sf/f need books that aren’t that, that give new readers a place to start, that are comfort reading, that are wish fulfillment ('someday I will be discovered and swept off to a pre-eminent place in my society'). McCaffrey’s books fit the bill wonderfully and as I find myself honing my books to be every the more esoteric and clever (driven on by a writing group that is quick to point out the already-done) I hope a day will come when I can write even one thing that is as accessible and well-beloved as the books of Anne McCaffrey.

Recommended books:

Decision at Doona, The Ship Who Sang, "Weyr Search" , The Smallest Dragonboy", Dragonsong (I want to include Dinosaur Planet but I don’t remember enough about it.)

- Lisa Shapter

Read "No Woman, No Plaything" in Kaleidotrope

Preparing for Halloween

lisashapter@whilewaitingtobepublished.com (Lisa Shapter) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:17:20 GMT

Last night I went to a charming presentation on local ghost stories. It took place in a local theater, included a tour of the theater’s back stage, and had many wonderful photos of local landmarks and graveyards. The graveyards were not simply set dressing, the photos showed the details of the oldest slate stones with the spookiest art. (One does not have to go far in this part of New England to find graveyards: many old family plots border roads or the modern buildings which have taken over what was once wide-open farmland, there are also plenty of old churches with attached cemeteries.)

The photos also included angles and interiors of some landmarks which are usually not open to the public. (Sometimes a ghost hunting show will come on tv which shows the insides of the same buildings -- but always at night which never does them justice.) So the presentation was a sightseeing tour (from a comfortable theater seat) and a fine evening of eerie tales.

I had already seen the backstage of the theater but it was nice to visit it again. It began life as a brick waterfront warehouse so it was interesting to see its bare basement walls and the different phases of construction. I came home and read an old volume of ghost stories from British estates and wrote a note to buy an extra bag of candy this year (we almost ran out, last time).

-Lisa Shapter

Read "No Woman, No Plaything" in Kaleidotrope

September Typecast

lisashapter@whilewaitingtobepublished.com (Lisa Shapter) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 17:52:52 GMT

Writers of the Future

lisashapter@whilewaitingtobepublished.com (Lisa Shapter) — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 19:14:00 GMT

This post is down for renovation. All of the information it contained can be found by Google.

(c) Lisa Shapter 2010 All rights reserved.

Story 37: The Novella

lisashapter@whilewaitingtobepublished.com (Lisa Shapter) — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 23:08:30 GMT

I wrote a 106 page novella this week. At the start of this week it did not exist. Monday it was a 6-page short story titled “Story 37”, one I revised and sent out to a publisher by Friday. I intended to write “Story 38” and perhaps “Story 39” the same week: I already knew what they were going to be. (In the sense that their two narrators were standing beside me with things they urgently wanted to say.)

So how does it feel to write 106 pages (33,144 words, half the length of a short novel) in a week? Dazing, exhilarating, surprising. I spent most of the week in the narrator’s world rather than my own, I put off obligations, sent people away with a curt phone conversation or a vague wave, I worried about her worries and went to sleep every night hoping I would have time to write the next day – and that I would get anything to write the next day. Each day I would stop and have no idea what came next: if I had no time to write for a few days then the narrator would leave, the plot and setting would evaporate, and I would be no better at finishing the story than a reader would be at guessing the ending of a few chapters torn out of an unfamiliar book.

When this novella arrived I:

Was revising a novella for a contest that starts tomorrow. I had the manuscript marked up and needed to type in the corrections, close a plot hole, and go over the manuscript again after a few day’s rest.
Was shortening another novella for a new market (or perhaps a new set of markets). I had about another 1/3rd to cover and I needed to give the new version a read-through to be certain it made sense and none of the conversations sounded choppy.
Had just retyped my tracking list (on a typewriter), meaning I needed to check it against my other records to be certain I did not carry over any errors or skip anything. (I might catch it when I reviewed the list next year but I would rather not have a manuscript be in limbo because I made a clerical error, I forgot I had not sent it out (only thought about or researched sending it out), or because a publisher went out of business or changed focus and I misplaced the memo or never got one.)
Had just typed (again on a typewriter) a previous blog entry which needed to be scanned and uploaded and is now out of order.
Had 5 stories arrive from members of my writing group. I need to read them and write up comments: it’s not too late but it will be a crush to get them all read.
Had 2 rejection slips arrive: 2 stories now need checking and research on where I can send them next. (The first several markets will already have stories of mine on their desks, will not take works that long or that short, will not take stories with a certain tone or theme, or will not pass a rule-of-thumb check for professionalism and longevity. If I just wanted to see my own name online, well I have a blog for that.)
Researched 6 magazines and contests for various works (including the ever-hard-to-place novellas). Now that the project has gone cold I need to sort out where I was, if I missed any deadlines, and get everything into envelopes or out via email (making certain the word count, file types and manuscript formats are correct).
Had 2 other short stories ready to be written. Waiting a few days may have meant I lost the narrators and settings for those 2 stories.
Did not pay bills, write letters or emails, return calls, open any mail, go out, run errands, see friends, pay full attention to anyone or anything or see to any commitments that did not involve the very basics of keeping body and soul together. Think of the International 3-Day Novel Contest but unscheduled, unplanned and alone. (Unless you count “Story 37”’s narrator who is not real to (or bothering) anyone but me.)

Worse, the work I have just given a week of my life to (longer if I want it to be anything but a first draft) may never see anything but the top of my desk drawer. Most markets won’t look at anything longer than 5,000 words* (or 20,000 at the ones that take long short stories). “Story 37: The Novella” can’t be cut that much nor could it be padded 2 ½ times to make an acceptable novel manuscript for a top of the line publisher. (Unless the narrator spends several pages of each chapter thinking about her early childhood, wondering what color to paint the living room, what life would have been like if she had married that Balmer guy she knew before enlisting, lying in a field describing a single blade of grass, or taking apart the nose assembly of her space ship to see exactly what is inside it.) In other words it may be a complete waste of time: from the point of view of writing-for-anyone-but-me I might have been better off this week writing and sending out “Story 37”, “Story 38” and “Story 39”. However, I have faith that someone, somewhere will want to publish this (and the 16 other novellas I have written) so I keep at it.

* 5,000 words is about 21 manuscript pages formatted according to William Shunn’s guidelines, which are more-or-less the standard for Science Fiction magazines.

-Lisa Shapter

Read "No Woman, No Plaything" in Kaleidotrope

The 37th Story

lisashapter@whilewaitingtobepublished.com (Lisa Shapter) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 20:36:10 GMT

I’ve just finished the 37th story in my 74 Stories Project: I am now halfway through the project of following Ray Bradbury’s advice to write, finish, and send out 1 short story a week. (This was in the age of typewriters, so some of that week would have been devoted to the mechanics of re-typing the entire manuscript in order to make corrections.) I can finish 2 short stories a week if I clear the decks, turn off the phone, compose directly into the computer, get an unusually good first draft and get away with very minor revisions.

The 74 number is arbitrary: I don’t want to do this forever. (I have 13 novels and novellas which need some degree of revision, from “there’s nothing after page 43" (it needs to be written or typed from a handwritten first draft) to “do a last check to make sure nothing violates series chronology and go over the details of fermenting soy sauce”.) I chose the non-round number of 74 because all of these stories are part of the novel The 75th Story. I am not simply writing any 74 stories I can think of: these 74 stories are in order, have an overall character arc, 5 continuing characters and a universe shared with 18 other novels and novellas. When I add them to The 75th Story I will need to add transitional scenes: recurring characters drop in and out between the 74 stories; new characters join the protagonists needing to be taken to their scheduled destinations, jail, or a hospital; and the main protagonist has a long-distance marriage to keep up which is new and not yet on a firm foundation. (He mentions his husband in some of the stories but there is no time in a 5,000 word short story to dwell on a relationship that takes place completely outside the story’s frame.)

I feel very pleased, surprised and proud to be at the halfway mark on this project. When I started I wondered how soon I would quit, or find a hobby (like cleaning antique typewriter letters with a toothpick) more interesting, or if this year would be yet another with a significant illness or some other unavoidable matter. By now I have settled into a routine, I feel comfortable writing at this pace, I have no trouble coming up with 2,000-8,000 words every few days, I revise because I hate to see things starting at my from my computer's desktop, and I can look forward to the first of these stories "No Woman, No Plaything" being published in Kaleidotrope.

-Lisa Shapter

Read "No Woman, No Plaything" in Kaleidotrope

My Dreams Are u/ l,Jr"^, \.,rL -er b

lisashapter@whilewaitingtobepublished.com (Lisa Shapter) — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 22:23:32 GMT

I got a new scanner with OCR. My dreams of simply putting notebook pages down on the glass and having workable first drafts to start from were dashed when a neatly printed list came out as this:

}.;r';?;' ( ,- t. t

i.: Pt'atc*c 3cL.r-*r ?5f,2

-_- ( t-l ,. r.t fo< g)

&,o<r" *tFT'o *'-f5(L, ( ,}"t ",, *" i-;' ' ') . n

I can't even tell what that is, even with the original list at hand.

However, a new scanner means the typecasting can resume.

I wanted to write "Story 37" of the 74 Stories Project today but I was waylayed by waiting a geologic age for a flu shot, looking for the appropriate people vitamins for my elderly cat (under a vet's advice: it took 3 different stores to find the right ones), stopping by the post office, realizing I had forgotten to zerox something important that needed to go into an outbound envelope, talking to the workmen outside my home, today's rejection slip and the rare after-the-flu-shot feeling that I might be getting sick in another few days and ought to lie down fortified by cold orange juice and hot tea.

I may be writing "Story 37" in bed: it will be a relief to move on to the second half of these stories, there is an overall character arc to them and it will be good to see the narrator moving into the downward slope.

(The apple dish I settled on yesterday was "Apple Charlotte": very nice but it calls for a lot of diced apples.)

-Lisa Shapter

Read "No Woman, No Plaything" in Kaleidotrope

Apple Picking

lisashapter@whilewaitingtobepublished.com (Lisa Shapter) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 19:35:38 GMT

Not the famous Frost poem but my weekend. I should have brought my camera: I spent a perfect New England Fall day (warm in the sun but cool enough for a sweater) with a milk-glass blue sky picking apples and raspberries (not very many) at a farm next to a craft fair in rural New Hampshire. There was aisle upon aisle of apple trees thick with fruit, a tractor ride out to the orchard, fresh vegetables, live music, and barbecue. I finished the afternoon with ice cream.

It was a day crammed full of New Englandiana and when I hurried out the door in the morning I thought about my camera but knew nothing about the apples: the craft fair sounded small enough so that the photos would not be all that impressive. (And it was the kind of craft fair where you can buy things made out of neon colored polyethylene fleece and 'country crafts', not the kind of craft fair with live alpacas and undyed hand-spun wool.)

I now have two bags of apples (I had one bag already from a grocery store but the prospect of picking a second bag, myself, under that perfect sky was too tempting.) I'm ransacking The Spice Cookbook for things to do with apples ....

The postcards for my forthcoming short story are done (two-step printing process and all). Now I just need to finish the addresses: the stamps are on their way.

-Lisa Shapter

Read "No Woman, No Plaything" in Kaleidotrope

Harold Lloyd Typecast

lisashapter@whilewaitingtobepublished.com (Lisa Shapter) — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 01:48:44 GMT

Read post here. (My scanner died the day after writing this entry.)

-Lisa Shapter

Read "No Woman, No Plaything" in Kaleidotrope

My New Short Story

lisashapter@whilewaitingtobepublished.com (Lisa Shapter) — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 04:06:00 GMT

My short story "No Woman, No Plaything" will appear in Kaleidotrope next year. It is the 17th (or rather the 16 and 1/2th) story I wrote as part of the 74 Stories Project, my following of Ray Bradbury's advice to finish a short story a week.

It is set in the same universe as "The World in his Throat" (here in paper form or read it on a Kindle). If you feel you are missing out on something read this:

Or at second best (there are, as ever, differences), watch this:

(Fritz Lang's wife, Thea von Harbou, wrote the screenplay and novel for Metropolis.)

(The placeholder title of "No Woman, No Plaything" was "Art Deco Planet".)

-Lisa Shapter

Read "No Woman, No Plaything" in Kaleidotrope

A Warning about PublishAmerica

lisashapter@whilewaitingtobepublished.com (Lisa Shapter) — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 00:06:55 GMT

If you had not already heard about PublishAmerica, here is an additional mark against them from the LA Times:

J.K. Rowling's lawyers have issued a cease-and-desist letter to the company PublishAmerica, which claimed it would, for a fee, bring its authors' books to the attention of the woman who created Harry Potter .... J.K. Rowling was not going to be making herself available for any presentation [of manuscripts from PA], according to her representative. A spokesperson for Rowling said the claim was 'completely false'," Publishers Weekly reports....

Any would-be author who has done their homework about the publishing business (the kind of publishing which makes the best seller list) should know that it's not Y famous author you want to get your manuscript into the hands of. Another author cannot be much help: what you really want is Y famous author's editor at the publishing house or their literary agent.

(It is very rude to ask an author to set you up with their agent or editor: most authors won't and they'll tag you as a to-be-avoided jerk if you ask.)

Who is PublishAmerica?

PublishAmerica is a print-on-demand company that offers hopeful authors the opportunity to be published outside of the mainstream publishing ecosystem. It accepts manuscripts without agents and has little of the traditional retail distribution and marketing infrastructure that established publishers do. That may be to the detriment of the writers who give their trust -- and money -- to PublishAmerica. The company "has a long history of making dubious marketing promises to its authors" writes Publishers Weekly ....

If you want to get something into print get to know the publishing industry first. A good publisher doesn't simply own a printing press or have a staff of crack ebook formatters: a good publisher pays their authors, publicizes their work with a professionalism and on a scale that no individual or small company could equal (full page New York Times ads with professional graphic design, their equivalent online and on national TV and radio), contacts and an established reputation with the most respected reviewers and interviewers, a professional staff to talk up your work to book buyers and cultural tastemakers, and a reliable relationship with the 3 or 4 companies who put books on the shelves of every American library and bookstore (including the online ones) you can name. (The publishers do not do this work themselves and small publishers are often shut out of this closed system.)

Have a long read at the "Writing" section of your local library and large bookstore: learn the boring stuff about how the publishing industry works (not how it might work or could work if everyone bought an e-reader tomorrow and could also afford every ebook they ever wanted in one backwards-compatible universal format).

Do not settle. Start with the best publishers, the gold standard, the publishers of the majority of the fiction you read (if you can't name them then you haven't done enough homework about getting published; if you don't read then there's little hope for you as a writer). Read Predictors and Editors and give your work the best chance with the best publishers out there: it is very unlikely that a book first published on a website or a vanity press will ever be picked up by another, more reputable publisher.

Both quotes come from:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2011/08/jk-rowling-publish-america.html

-Lisa Shapter

The 127th Draft

lisashapter@whilewaitingtobepublished.com (Lisa Shapter) — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 23:39:20 GMT

I just read this article in the paper:

http://articles.boston.com/2011-08-05/ae/29855699_1_novel-books-chris-bohjalian

One thing I would like to do is hyperlink each of my works. I have artwork, reference photos, video and text literary sources and references, scenes written from different characters’ points of view across different books, internal historical references, and (very rarely) music that appears in individual scenes. This would be terrible for a first read of each book: most of the hyperlinked items would destroy the flow or give things away. (Or turn each book into a carnival of "Let's see what this button does!") It would be fun for people re-reading each book. (I would also like to add a partial author’s (or another character’s) commentary to each book.)

Most of my books depend on a suspended ignorance and change under the eyes as the reader reads additional works. Each work has things beyond it’s narrator’s knowledge and perception and once the reader knows them they are suddenly reading a different story: a triumph becomes a decline, a heartbreak becomes a golden memory, a murderer becomes no such thing (even if we watched them fire the gun on a prior page). (This is why it is frustrating to have so little of this published: each individual work is only a starting place and does not show what I am up to.)

The books are not puzzles in a traditional sense: there is no hidden real-world treasure to find or logic puzzles to work out. They are stories that will not fit into one point of view (no matter how perceptive or far-seeing) or within the length of one novel.

I sometime do get more of a book after I have finished it but I would not like the opportunity to constantly tinker with my old work: when it is done it is done, I have already done my best to make it the book the narrator(s) wanted and there is little more I can do.

-Lisa Shapter

CyberHome DVR 1200

lisashapter@whilewaitingtobepublished.com (Lisa Shapter) — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 03:33:54 GMT

This is a public service announcement: for those looking for a universal remote control for the CyberHome DVR 1200 a Philips SRP1003/27 universal remote ($13 at a local drug store) with code 1906 gives this DVD player/recorder arrow keys, fast forward, etc.

(I found the DVR at a yard sale with no remote, CyberHome is out of business, and it looked I would have to put in a disk and wait if I wanted to watch the third episode of a TV show DVD. Problem solved.)

Now back to mucking around with typewriters and sending manuscripts out to magazines.

-Lisa Shapter

(c) Lisa Shapter 2010 All rights reserved.

Typewriter T-Shirts

lisashapter@whilewaitingtobepublished.com (Lisa Shapter) — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 06:59:32 GMT

I now have two modest Cafe Press stores made for my own amusement. I make no pretense of knowing anything about graphic design. There are some pictures of typewriters and some of my less awful local photos.

The raw links:
http://www.cafepress.com/ShapterDesignsBeta
http://www.cafepress.com/ShapterDesigns

-Lisa Shapter

(c) Lisa Shapter 2010 All rights reserved.

Hermes Rocket 2

lisashapter@whilewaitingtobepublished.com (Lisa Shapter) — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 05:06:55 GMT

This is the typewriter used to create the previous post:

Here are two of its elegant and well-thought-out features:

1) a fold-away pop-up lever to hold your paper upright while you type:

2) a universally labeled line-spacing lever (set to "single spaced" in the photo) which doubles as a carriage lock:

Such an elegant machine!

-Lisa Shapter

(c) Lisa Shapter 2010 All rights reserved.

Hermes Rocket 1

lisashapter@whilewaitingtobepublished.com (Lisa Shapter) — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 04:46:59 GMT

What Does a Silent Typewriter Sound Like?

lisashapter@whilewaitingtobepublished.com (Lisa Shapter) — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 02:23:13 GMT

By the grace of @mpclemens, I have joined the typosphere.

As promised, a Remington Portable Noiseless typewriter sounds like this.

And a Remington 5 typewriter (a normal brandmate) sounds like this.

This is what the Remington 5 typewriter used to write the last entry looks like:

-@LisaShapter

(c) Lisa Shapter 2010 All rights reserved.

Remington 5 Typecast

lisashapter@whilewaitingtobepublished.com (Lisa Shapter) — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 01:41:00 GMT

Remington Noiseless Portable Typewriter 2

lisashapter@whilewaitingtobepublished.com (Lisa Shapter) — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 03:44:00 GMT

The last entry was typed on this: my Remington Noiseless Portable typewriter:

This is a closeup of the type:

This is what it sounds like.

More information on this kind of typewriter:
http://machinesoflovinggrace.com/rems.htm
http://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/rem-portables.htm#noiselessportable

-Lisa Shapter

(c) Lisa Shapter 2010 All rights reserved.