One thing I can’t bear is when a series contorts itself into doing some kind of special. So anyway, next week is Jane Austen week on my 58keys YouTube channel. That would include the OG Wednesday 58keys which is specifically for writers who use and write on Macs, iPhones and iPads.

To the best of my knowledge, Jane Austen never wrote a word on 128GB iPad mini with A17 processor.

That’s what 58keys has been about now for some years, using this type of technology to type on. You can call it a way of putting off writing by over-thinking which word processor to use, and you can call it over-obsessing with tools like the To Do app OmniFocus, without which I would not have a writing business juggling all that I do.

But last year I added a second weekly video, specifically about writing itself. Each Monday, I tell you how I happen to write something, and I ask that you please disagree with me in the comments. I do not ever kid about this: I cannot see any value in my just telling you what I think, it’s only useful if you and I talk about the topic afterwards, if I can steal from you afterwards.

Then this year, 58keys Patreon member Mark Horton — take a look at his blog — suggested I do a 58keys book club in an exclusive YouTube Membership series. I turned it into a script and screenplay club instead, and YouTube Membership turned it into a dud. But since scripts are another obsession, just finding out that anyone at all was up for discussing them with me was addictive and so now I’ve made it a completely free video every Friday.

Next Friday’s is about Emma Thompson’s glorious screenplay version of Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility”. Next Monday’s workshop is about writing lessons I think I’ve learned from Jane Austen, and I’ll be asking you to tell me in the comments whether I’ve totally misunderstood her.

It’s the Wednesday technology one that’s giving me pause. She wrote with a quill, not an Apple Pencil. Although maybe Cassandra Austen couldn’t have destroyed so many of her letters if Jane Austen had only used an iCloud backup.

There is the fact, truly, that the first time I read a Jane Austen novel, it was on my iPhone. I can see me on holiday in the late 2000s, reading Pride and Prejudice on this thing, having to swipe to the next screenful every couple of paragraphs. And being so into it that I never noticed I was swiping.

And then there’s also this, which to my mind makes it right to celebrate Jane Austen even if it takes a little contrivance. This year is her 250th anniversary.

The actual 250th is in December, as it’s of her birth. But she died on July 18, 1817. Every year at this time, significant anniversary or not, Katie Lumsden runs Jane Austen month on her Books and Things channel on YouTube, and I’ve stolen the idea from her. Well, I’ve stolen a quarter of it: if I tried to do a whole Jane Austen month on 58keys, we’d soon be down to which colour iPhone might she have preferred.

It might be worth it. I keep thinking how I’m writing to you on a simply preposterously over-powerful Mac Studio which probably cost more than Pemberley did in her day, and that I’m using a ridiculously wide monitor that’s at least the price of a barouche and horses.

She just had paper and a quill.

And forget swiping every few paragraphs, she had to keep breaking off writing to dip that quill in ink.

Yet look what she wrote. True, there are people who’ve vaguely glanced at TV versions of her work and think it’s about young women with nothing in their heads but marriage, and nothing on their heads but happy bonnets. And truly, she’s really writing about women struggling to simply survive. Truly she is capable of being vicious at the same time as being laugh-aloud funny, but okay, there is also the odd bonnet.

I am re-reading and relishing the work of a woman who wrote a quarter of a millennium ago. Myself, I’d be pleased if I ever thought my writing would be remembered in a quarter of an hour.