The earliest of my many hundreds of Globe and Mail articles were written on an old Royal typewriter borrowed from my then-mother-in-law. I found out later that Ernest Hemingway was also a Royal man. I loved the confident sound of manual typewriter keys crashing onto the paper, especially at the beginning of a writing project. My secret for beating writer's block is a laptop program that emulates the sound of an old typewriter. There's even a carriage return lever bell that sounds when I press Enter!