Robert Priest's Blog: Blogging not logging - Posts Tagged "ergonomics"

I've been trying out a new writing ergonomic. On the speaker that sits atop a stool I have my laptop and I'm taking a cord out of its DVI port and into the HDMI port on my TV which sits atop about a 5 foot high fancy inherited cupboard kind of thing all carved out of wood. And I'm using Dragon speak to have my voice turned into text. I'm dictating while standing in front of the TV which is basically at eye height if I stand back about 4 feet. At this distance I'm able to read without my glasses. I'm doing all this in an attempt to thwart the headaches I've been getting. Since migraine medicine relieves them I figure they must actually be migraines especially since they are brought on so often by a change in pressure but I also think that overuse of certain muscle pathways related to sitting at the computer are key triggers. A lot of that is just about how the head sits atop the neck bones and what muscles get overused. I've brought consciousness to this and done my best just altering my habitual posture while writing but no surprise the act of composition is so all-consuming that there's not enough consciousness left to maintain the posture command. So now I'm right out of the chair standing up and my head simply has to sit differently to see the TV and the text. So far so good.

had a great book launch for Second Kiss at the Dora Keogh in Toronto. Sold a goodly number of books through Ben McNally books. Meanwhile toiling daily on the follow-up Missing Piece and I'm really enjoying it. First draft is almost complete including formatting of text etc. It being a book about pieces I have a number of fairly small fractured chapters but a large cast of characters.

Monday I'm off to Salerno Italy for a poetry Festival. Back on June 10. That's my fourth travel this season, more than usual for sure, especially when I've got a book to finish but the same thing happened when I went to Japan and had to finish Second Kiss and look how good that turned out (I tell myself).

In between times I'm gigging with my band, (just did a great gig at say what in Toronto), writing songs, writing poems for my new book of children's poems called People like you and Me. And about halfway through a book about old poems which includes quite a number of sonnets I'm slightly embarrassed to say.

I have an idea for a new young adult novel after I finished missing piece. But this one will take place in our world and not be a fantasy. But the main character will be a kind of rude brilliant revolutionary chatty person. That will be about April Fools' Day.

I've also changed my workstation again. I now have a wireless keyboard and I sit about 4 feet back from a large iMac screen with the resolution up large so I have no problem seeing it. Mostly I dictate but when necessary I have the little keyboard with the touchpad on my lap. I probably write three times as much like this is I ever did or could physically in my years of plunking at a typewriter. That's good because there's a lot of ancillary writing tasks that go with being a writer and it's easy to get up in the morning and wind up doing two or three hours of feeling forms and writing emails so that by the time you're finished the energy for creative writing has been severely dipped into by mundane but necessary tasks. Now I can do that work which isn't psychologically taxing and have it not be physically taxing either so that late in the day if I get inspired and need to spill out some whole episode or chapter or delineate an idea I can do it without hurting myself.
And that's good. Plus I'm learning a bit of Italian