"You don't mean to say you write it out longhand, do you?" 

Is there a next question? 

I reply to that this way: "Listen, you imbecile, there is only one way anybody should compose and that is upon a manual typewriter." 

I then tell them that statement is in the Bible somewhere and they ask me, "Oh, yeah?" 

And I reply, "Verily." 

Then they ask, "Where in the Bible?" 

And I say, "The book of Royal," and they say there is no book of Royal in the Bible, and by that time I'm halfway down the street and the conversation is over. 

I abhor computers. And I don't know how they work, and I don't intend to find out. I believe computers are responsible for a great number of ills in this society. 

For one thing, when people screw up today, all they have to do is blame it on the computer. If you screwed up before computers, you had to be clever and imaginative in coming up with a means of covering your tail. 

You had to say, "The dog did it," or "You might not believe this, sir, but I was just sitting here at my desk when a large goat walked in and ate the report you wanted right off my desk." 

Ronald Reagan, who was our president, never blamed anything on a computer. When he screwed up, he actually told the truth and said, "I forgot." 

Besides all that, since I don't know how computers work and refuse to find out, it could mean computers are magic. That could also mean they are the work of evil spirits, the kind that made Jimmy Swaggart go out and look for hookers. 

You get evil spirits involved in anything and pretty soon the economy fails, crime rates go up, politicians begin writing bad checks, and all presidential candidates go around blithering like idiots. 

And this one other thing. I have steadfastly refused to compose upon a computer because I'm not sure where the words go to when you put them into that electric box and push a button and they disappear from the screen. 

"Oh, but you can always call them back up," computer-breaths say to me. 

Never say always. 

You start fooling around with anything mechanical and something eventually will go wrong with it. A dog could go to the bathroom on a wire in my neighborhood and it could cause a short, and all 417 pages of my new book could be lost forever. 

Do you think if Margaret Mitchell had done "Gone With the Wind" on a computer, and it had all disappeared because of a dog's indiscretion, she would have gone to all the trouble of rewriting GWTW? 

Of course not. She would have killed herself. 

When I work on a book, I type it on white sheets of paper with a Royal manual typewriter. I make many copies of each sheet. I keep copies in various rooms of my home. I give other copies to friends. I put others in a vault I rent that is buried 5,000 feet underneath Stone Mountain. 

I'm not about to lose a book. 

And they have said I was crazy and old-fashioned because I wouldn't give way to high-tech. 

Well, I told you so. Computer virus. 

It's been all over the news that something called Michelangelo, probably an evil spirit, could get into computers and wipe out everything stored in them. Great industries could be brought to their knees. Kingdoms could crumble. Authors could kill themselves in droves. 

I was right. Something can get into a computer and lobotomize it. 

The only thing that ever got into my typewriter was a large roach, which I promptly typed to an uppercase death with the dollar and ampersand keys. 

As I said, I don't know Bo about computers. But I heard on television that the way a virus gets into one is when an infected floppy disk is inserted into it. 

Do they make condoms for computers?