In Quest of the Perfect Song

When I started writing notes for The Perfect Song in the winter of 1979, my office was a converted bedroom in the basement of our small, rural ranch house. My typewriter was a Smith-Corona portable manual. You had to hit the keys fairly hard so the steel letters pushed the ink on the ribbon with enough force to leave the black imprint on the white (blank) page. When you hit the end of the line, you manually pushed the carriage back to the left side of the page to keep writing.

When you hit the end of the page you pulled the page out and inserted a new blank page.

Many years later my daughter told me as a toddler she lay in bed and listened to the sound of the keys tapping. It was comforting and helped put her to sleep.

If the tapping stopped she often woke up and waited for it to begin again.

I was still working on the book eight years later when my daughter and a friend were exploring my office. One of them accidentally bumped a stack of 200 manuscript papers on my desk, scattering them all over the floor. They were mortified and afraid I’d be really mad. I was a little sick about it but the pages were numbered.

We were now in the early 1980’s. I set The Perfect Song aside for a year. Why?

For sex and money.

More in the next post.