Chapter Three: Done; Keyboard Woes; Prepping for NaNoWriMo

Reading: Great Fool: Zen Master Ryokan: Poems, Letters, and Other Writings (Ryuichi Abe & Peter Haskel, eds. & trans.)
Listening: YUI, "It's all too much"
Redraft: Book One, Ch. 4, v.30.0 (on hiatus until after NaNoWriMo 2009)

Looking back through my redraft printouts, I came to the unpleasant realization that it took me a full (read: neither the-better-part-of-a nor even a-day-less-than-a) month to rewrite Chapter Three. Granted, I could only make this realization upon actually completing the Chapter Three redraft at roughly 12:08 a.m. this morning--an accomplishment which fills me with equally inordinate levels of pride and exhaustion--but the cold, clear fact remains that this will likely be the last chapter of Book One I shall rewrite before diverting my creative attention to my project for NaNoWriMo 2009. That I still don't know precisely which story will comprise that project only underscores the need to prepare before I type out the first word on Nov. 1st.

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Before I delve headlong into the month-long distraction that is NaNoWriMo, I thought I should pause for a somewhat elegiac note. Early last morning, I came to the sober conclusion that my Kinesis Contoured Keyboard, despite having provided what I believe was the best, most ergonomically sound typing experience of my $1000+ foray into the realm of ridiculously priced keyboards, would have to end up on the eBay chopping block. The reason, infuriatingly enough, lies in its American build quality: the tiny membrane switches at the top of the keyboard, which control hotkey essentials like the function keys and the print screen key--the latter of which I remapped to open My Computer at a key press--have either gone slightly non-responsive, or, in the case of the aforementioned print screen key, hyper-responsive, resulting in my email responses being incessantly interrupted by a never-ceasing torrent of My Computer windows. Seeing as this particular keyboard ranks among the most expensive to have ever crossed my desktop--the only 'board to top it is the Topre Realforce 91U that I'm typing on right now--its failure after a mere two years of ownership becomes particularly distressing. Coupled with the battleship-like build I've come to expect of my Japanese-made keyboards, along with my previous abortive ownership of the U.S.-made Das Keyboard Professional, my outlook on all U.S. keyboards has pretty much soured. A true shame, as no keyboard quite stacks up to the Kinesis Contoured's design. Only its implementation leaves much--too much--to be desired.

(Even as I type this entry, my RSI started to act up, and I was forced to switch to one of the Filco Tenkeyless models--ironically, the one that shares the same Cherry brown keyswitches as the Kinesis.)

(EDIT: and two hours after typing this post, I'm switching the Cherry-brown Filco for the Cherry-black. I swear, if the Kinesis Contoured came in a Cherry-black model, I'd plunk down another $300 just to give it a whirl, despite Kinesis's quality issues.)

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I'll follow up shortly with my progress in whittling down the three potential NaNoWriMo candidates this year to the one that will, with any luck, grow to 50K words (or more) by Nov. 30th. That and an updated entry on my writing desk, as soon I get it tidied up enough so that it won't break the camera when I take the picture.