About Ten Keyboards

There are times when you go to the world and other times when the world comes to you. Ten Keyboards is about the world coming to me.

You see, I wanted to have a blog about writing so I created WriteBlog. But I couldn’t figure out a theme. When you can’t figure out what the “book” is going to be about, your writing goes everywhere and mine did for a year. To my credit, I was persistent in writing, even though I knew not for whom I was writing outside of myself.

Then, in the fall of 2006, I went to Write on the Sound, a writers conference here in Seattle-land, simply because I gave myself a goal to attend a writers conference in 2006.

I went to learn about writing. Instead, I learned what my mission was for a writing blog.

In every session, the questions were either about how to implement technology or why the writer should implement the technology. Web sites, blogs, what to have on a computer, what writing software works the best - the questions flowed and the answers were disappointing. The speakers didn’t have a clue on how to answer the questions.

It was so bad that after I answered one question about why a writer should blog, four people in the seminar asked me for my name and site address because they understood that I knew what they wanted to know.

That was when the world came to me and defined my mission for Ten Keyboards: helping writers use technology to market their work.

There are a million blogs about technology out there. Very few are written from the viewpoint of a writer trying to develop a voice and market their work.

I am a struggling writer, trying to successfully write. But my day job in technology gives me this wonderful ability to know how technology works.

I’ll help explain technology for writers. We’ll build a community that will help all of us in our writing.

I have been asked by several people — how did you come to name the blog Ten Keyboards? Well, the purpose of my spot on the web is technology for writers using technology to help a writer market their work. So I wanted a name that conveyed both writing and technology.

The most common technical tool writers share is the personal computer; either in desktop or laptop form. I thought if I could use a name from the components of the personal computer, it might work. Hard drive? No. Monitor? No. Software? No. Keyboard? Oh, we all write on keyboards, so keyboards it was.

Ten Keyboards? Writing on steroids!

Scot