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I remember visiting my grandmother Adele in Ponce Inlet, Florida, when I was three years old, and she had an IBM electric typewriter. I thought that this electric typewriter was about the most fascinating toy in the world - I liked the little bell and the sounds and the feel of the keys and especially the erase key.

My mother was a great typist. She said she loved to type because it gave her time to think. She was a secretary for an insurance company. She was a poor girl; she'd grown up in an orphanage, and she went to a business college - and then worked to put her brothers through school.

I'm a relic, and things were a lot different when I was fifteen and sixteen. There were no cell phones, no laptops... I learned to type on an actual typewriter.

I still use a typewriter from time to time, but because I can't type as well as I used to, I really don't use one very much.

I'm kind of a Luddite myself. I've got a bunch of typewriters at home. I'm a big fan of old technology.

When I was very little, four or five, I did comic strip drawings, so my first novel had no words. I couldn't write and thought adult handwriting was a mysterious scribble. When I was 14, my grandmother gave me a typewriter and I started writing in a different way.

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.

I write in longhand. I am accustomed to that proximity, that feel of writing. Then I sit down and type.

When I was about 12, I spent the summer writing four plays on my dad's old typewriter for a school play competition. And I wrote little comic bits at secondary school and at university.