So: here are the tools I use, listed together with why I think they work, or don’t work, as they should.

Editing and Writing Tools

Basic business machines

Photocopier:

Canon FC 230 desktop copier

Fax and telephone:

NEC ‘Speax’ 22CL

Telephone line:

ISDN with one digital
and two analogue lines

How to choose these basic business machines depends on your work flow: how you need to effectively receive and send back material to clients. Our photocopier is small and slow, but there is a self-service copy centre reasonably close by if we need to do larger volume work. The fax machine can receive and print originals up to B4 size, which is occasionally useful; it can also distinguish between faxes and regular telephone calls, which is essential. If you run a business from home, you really must have plenty of telephone lines. The virtue of our current setup is that it lets us use the data line and the telephone lines at the same time. We can also continue to respond to calls even as we are receiving a large fax transmission.

Additional equipment

Variable speed cassette player

If you are called upon to edit a transcription of conference proceedings – and if you can get access to the original tapes – this can be very helpful. There are also times when my students want to listen to language instruction tapes. For teaching purposes, I do not recommend the variable speed part; but the fact that it is there can make learners more comfortable. Make sure you get a model with a counter – they are surprisingly hard to find these days. If you plan to make tape transcription part of your business, get a real transcriber’s tape deck, complete with foot pedal and headphones.

Pens and pencils

Of course this is obvious, but we all have our preferences. This is a peculiar thing to admit to, but I have a physical aversion to writing with ballpoint pens: I find the sensation of the ball moving across the paper to be unpleasant. Rolling ball pens are much better, and I use these as my ‘away’ pens. My ‘home’ pen is a Waterman fountain pen, for which I use Pelikan black ink. Another peculiarity: I don’t use blue ink. For proof correction and other manuscript editing I use red rolling ball and felt-tip technical pens: a fine or .5mm point works well with most sizes of original text. I favour mechanical pencils and soft leads, although harder leads are best for finer work. I use a mechanical pencil with blue proof correcting lead for student work, on the philosophy that it looks kinder than red ink. My students don’t really care about this, but it makes me feel better.

Computers

Desktop:

Apple Macintosh Blue and White G3, Japanese OS 9.1

Laptop:

Apple Macintosh iBook G3 (late 2001 model), Japanese OS 9.1

Alcove, wrapped in plastic:

Apple Macintosh PowerMac 6100 (with third party G3 upgrade board), English OS 8.51 with Japanese Language Kit
(the recently retired but still-might-be-useful computer)

Closet:

Apple Macintosh LC 630, Japanese OS 8.5
(the spare computer, just in case)

Peripherals:

Flatbed scanner, Zip drive, MO drive, external hard disk, colour inkjet printer, ISDN terminal adapter

Sensitive readers will note that the above are Macintosh computers. I have been doing the bulk of my work on computers since about 1988, and back then I didn’t have very much money, so I spent many years using DOS and later Windows based systems. Now that I have a choice, I use Apple computers exclusively. I am not religious about it, but if anyone asks what I recommend, I recommend Apple.

My feeling about computers in general is that the less we talk about them, the better off we are. I am never entirely happy that so much of my work depends on the computer; but I am pleased with the iBook – it is the best computer I have ever worked with. Sometimes it even feels like a typewriter, and I mean that as a great compliment.

I have Apple’s new OS X, but I don’t use it. The type is beautiful, its language capability – the ability to move seamlessly between Japanese and English – looks promising, and none of my software works properly with it. Such is life. For readers who are considering using a ‘language kit’ to add Japanese capability to their systems, be aware that the better choice is to get a monolingual Japanese system. It will run English language software just fine, with the notable exception of Quark XPress, and it is far more stable than an English system pretending to be something it isn’t.

I will discuss software separately, as needed. The only thing it seems necessary to mention is that for practical purposes writers and editors have no choice but to work with Microsoft Word: that is what clients have, and that is what publishers want. It works, most of the time, which is all that needs to be said about it.

The peripheral devices I list here are minimum requirements for anyone running a home office. Zip drives are common in North America and curiosities in Japan; MO drives are everywhere here, and nowhere in North America. I invite comments from readers in Europe about how this regional preference works in other Western countries.

Office Matters

Filing and bookkeeping

One really must keep track of things. I used to work in libraries, I come from a civil service family, and I spent quite a bit of time as a bush league bureaucrat; all this means that I value filing more than I should, and keep just about everything that comes my way. Binding boxes are more useful to me than filing cabinets: they can be made to fit in smaller places, and they are easier to move around. I am still working on a way to keep track of everything I need to make reference to on a regular basis, and I hope to discuss that sort of thing in a series of essays on indexing.

I used to use specialized bookkeeping software, but now I find that a purpose-ruled notebook and a spreadsheet does the job just as well. Someday I hope to be complicated enough to require an accountant. Self-employed residents of Japan should try to be scrupulous about keeping records: you may some day be called upon to demonstrate that you are not a drain on the state, and there are few published rules on how to do this convincingly. The e-mail discussion list archive of the Society of Writers, Editors and Translators (SWET) Japan retains some useful discussion on these issues.

2002/05/25, with minor changes in September 2003

Date posted: 2003-09-15