The new toy worked out quite well this weekend. Based on reviews I hadn’t expected to get much more than 30 wpm or so during the first weekend of using it. But we did some wordwars during the write-in and I managed to get up to 47 wpm in one of those. That’s nearly as high as the highest sustained speed I tend to be able to write at here at home, so I’d say that’s definitely a success.

Thanks to that success, and to the wordwars spurring me on (and the fun of the write in) I managed more words than I’d really expected this weekend. Writing on the train on the way back home also helped, although that sort of went wrong after I’d blogged about it, when the time came to change to a different train.

Firstly the train I had to change to was late (by about 20 minutes) and secondly it was absolutely full. I ended up with a choice of standing, or sitting on the floor. New discovery: you can use my new keyboard while sitting cross-legged on the floor with the keyboard balanced on your backpack in front of you. Second discovery: staring at a PDA you’re writing on, while being shaken about by a train and facing sideways as opposed to looking towards the front or rear of the train, you get motion sickness after writing for a while.

That motion sickness put a stop to my train writing, but I had managed a nice number of words by then, and I’ve added some more since I came home (I’ve also been trying to do something else I should be doing, but that hasn’t been working as well yet). Anyway the final result is that I managed to get to 130k this weekend, where I hadn’t expected much more than 125k.

And in a final bit of keyboard news: I wrote the last 1.2k or so in bed, and it was pretty much as I’d imagined it: very comfortable, but somewhat hard to stay awake at times.