So it’s back to Barrain after a long time away.

37,000 words so far and this is what we call draft 3, although by our usual standards it’s more like an earlier draft.

The first thing to do is read what we have so far. I wince at the start—our starts are always bad—and read on, fixing up typos and cleaning up as I go.

One thing that strikes me reading on is how like One Man’s Treasure it is. (One Man’s Treasure is the workshop novel I have just finished a draft of.) The main character promises to find another character’s killer (or presumed killer).

In Barrain it’s:

I will get your killer, Mathers silently promised Caid. You saved my life once, it’s the least I can do for yours.

While in One Man’s Treasure it’s:

I will find who did this and …

Hmmm. Problems already. I’ll leave that for the moment and let it percolate. It may fix itself as the story goes on. Right now I have other things to fix.

Like birdwatching. The whole kick-off point for this story is dated. No-one uses ‘bird-watching’ any more to talk about guys looking at women. And even the birders don’t do bird-watching any more. They go birding. We may have to re-write the start. It’s a pity, because I’m quite attached to the start. (A sure sign we should ditch it.) Even Calder’s okay with the bit where we introduce Scott.

I can see a huge plot hole already. Why didn’t Kraa send Taliah in to save Caid? I know where the story is going, and I know that Kraa wants Caid, not just the crystal. A dead Caid would set Kraa’s plans back 20 years. But he just sits there and watches Franz and Jacob try to kill him.

Not only that, I’m only up to chapter four and there are typos and omitted words everywhere.

Chapter five is one big info dump.

Many of the secondary characters are stereotypes (as are some of the main characters). And so on.

It’s lovely to be able to see just how bad the writing is and what needs to be fixed. The time away has given me good distance. Unfortunately, the story is only half written. If we were up to a genuine third or fourth draft here it would be perfect, because we can see the flaws so clearly.

Up to chapter 11 now. I’m reading faster and noticing less errors. I should either stop and come back to it at another time, or the story is genuinely getting better. I can’t tell which, so I stop reading for the day.

Buying a netbook computer has boosted my writing output considerably, and it has given me a renewed enthusiasm for writing.

Even though it looks as if I haven’t written much for the last 12 months, I have. I have written a lot. I just haven’t been doing it on a computer because my writing time is away from home—travelling to and from work and snatched during lunch hours. I have been writing by hand.

I filled around 30 notebooks.  I have written lots of blogs. Most of them are still in my notebook. Some of them are obsolete now because they are no longer relevant.

I also wrote 30,000 words of my workshop novel.

30,000 words. 120 pages. Ten pages a month, and they weren’t even good pages.

Writing by hand comes with its own particular problems, of which I’ll blog about separately (the blog’s written, I just have to find which notebook it’s in) but the main problems for me were:

• It’s incredibly slow
• I don’t re-write hand-written text as I go because the re-writing slows me down. I do rewrite on the PC, because it’s easy to do. This means the handwritten text is less polished than the typed
• I have terrible handwriting. By the time I transfer the it to computer I can’t even read half of it, and I have no idea what I meant by the cryptic notes I made for myself at the time/

I know a writer who writes all his first drafts by hand. He wouldn’t do it any other way (and it’s not an age thing, because he’s younger than me). But I can’t write at that speed forever. I would only finish one novel every ten years.

Two months ago I bought a netbook computer. As a writer I had some specific requirements.

• A keyboard that I could type on
• Microsoft Word
• At least 1 megabyte of memory (so that I could run Office programs easily) and with more than one open at a time
• It had to fit into my handbag and be light enough for me to carry with comfort if I decided to, say, walk home from work

Things like wireless access and price were important, but not deciders.

I spent a lot of time in computer shops typing “A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. (Have you ever noticed, by the way, that all demo computers are at least two months old? In all the time that I looked I never saw one computer where the Microsoft trial was still running.)

Some computers were just too small. The Asus Eee PC, for example, was cute, but I simply could not type accurately. Some computers had good keyboards but when I picked them up they weighed a lot. Who wants to walk around with the equivalent of a bag of sugar in their bag? Not me.

I finally settled on the Acer Aspire One. The price had come down, it was being sold with XP and it had 1MB of memory so I knew I could put Word onto it. I specifically wanted Word so that I could update the document from either my desktop PC or the netbook, depending on where I was at the time. And it was the smallest keyboard that I could type with relative accuracy on.

It took courage to take it out in public the first few times. I felt really stupid. The first week I just carried it around in the bag. Then one morning I got brave, sat down in my local McDonalds with a coffee and muffin, and forced myself to use it.

It was a month before I would take it out every day and considered it normal. But now I do it over a coffee in the morning and in a small cafe over lunch. (You need to pick your lunch spots carefully. Choose quiet ones that are never full, and do later lunches, if you can. And don’t stay forever. There’s a backlash right now over people with computers who hog tables for hours over one coffee. My own etiquette rules are: always buy food as well as a drink, and never use the cafe’s power, only your battery.)

It’s costing me more in food (and I think I’m gaining weight) but the writing benefits are well worth it. Since I’ve had the netbook I have completed my workshop novel (another 30,000 words), and written a second draft.

Not only that, I have more enthusiasm for writing. I didn’t realise how much writing by hand was holding me back.