I squandered more than an hour today, I think, fixing my laptop keyboard. And by “fixing” I mean af-fixing. Putting snazzy little high contrast stickers on the keys. Why did I feel I must do this thing?

I bought a laptop some years ago, and I liked it well enough except for the keys. The letters were inscribed in them so lightly, and in such a thin typeface, that they actually vanished in low light. So I sent away for stickers with big bright letters on a black background.

Then, one day I broke that laptop’s screen. I went in and bought a replacement, which turned out to be the exact same model (because I’m cheap and so was it).  Then, also because I’m cheap, I pried the stickers off the old keys and stuck them onto the new ones.

But this apparently lowered the viscosity value of the adhesive, and the amount of typing I’m doing on this translation job seems to put too much pressure on the stickers. Some of them started sliding loose, and I knew this could not go on. So I splurged on a new set of stickers. Today I squandered potentially profitable time making the replacements. You wouldn’t think it would take long, but it does.

And that raises (not begs, I must insist) the question, why didn’t novel writing put the same wear and tear on the stickers? I do not know. Perhaps I’m not as intense when I’m writing a novel.

Formatting Hailstone Mountain for paperback has been a slightly bizarre experience. It meant reading it through, for the first time in more than a decade. I was prepared to find passages that I now felt could have been done better. Those I left mostly alone. I only fixed small and serious (in my opinion) errors. Like an odd letter “g” that sat wedged into in one sentence for no reason at all, apparently the result of a finger twitch on my last revision. The most radical change I made was to add three words to a setting description, because I thought the passage not as clear as it should have been, and possibly confusing to the reader.

This means that there will be slight differences between the e-book and the printed version. I don’t like to think about that situation, but I’m not OCD enough to go in and change the e-book at this point. And I’m comforted to remember that there were inconsistencies in various editions of The Lord of the Rings for quite a long time – and I, at least, never noticed.

But what’s really strange is to find oneself – to one’s astonishment and shock – moved by a few passages. It feels narcissistic to admire my own writing. But sometimes, I must admit, I do make the old jalopy run smooth. I once read somewhere that it’s impossible to tickle yourself. Bringing tears to your own eyes seems as unlikely. But it can happen.