Hitting the "Save" Key on a Moleskine

I want to take the opportunity to thank the founders of this extraordinarily good blog for giving me the opportunity to contribute. I hope to write my best and offer my best--or as Hemingway put it: "All I have tried to do is write the best I can... some times I get lucky and write better than I can."

At any rate, I was writing on one of my Moleskine cahiers today, going about 120 mph and at one point it seemed like my hand wanted to automatically reach for the Ctrl+S key combination and save what I had written. Of course, this comes from a long history of losing stuff I typed back in the day. I started working with computers when DOS was 1.o, and the best thing you could get on a PC of the day (possibly a x386 if you were lucky) was WordPerfect. Remember WordPerfect? I remember losing a great deal of typing--research papers, love letters to a certain senorita South of the Border, my letter of intent to join the U.S. Marines back in 1985, etc. I lost it all, and I mean all. All you had to do was try to print your document without first hitting F10. If you were lucky, you could do both things, and all was right with the world. Forget to hit F10 before hitting F7 and you could be in for the ride of your life in the "Wordlight Zone." Nowadays, I hit Ctrl+S just about every other even-numbered second or so.


And writing down my thoughts today when in reality I was supposed to be paying attention at a conference proved the ultimate test: listen to what was being said, write the next great American novel, listen to what was being said, write the next great American novel.... and every few seconds or so, hit Ctrl+S on my Moleskine! Cheers mates!

Sir Joseph Gould of Exeter