I said in another thread that I was hesitantly considering getting into straight razor shaving. Now I've begun trying it with a cheapo disposable-blade straight razor (like a Shavette, but with extra crappy) that I had lying around for touching up the edges of my moustache but had never really shaved with. It's not lovely, but it is shaped like a straight razor and the broken-in-half DE blades it uses are as sharp as you could ask for. The problem is, I don't actually know how to use it. I've read the guides on blade angle and types of strokes and all that, but my questions are so basic that they aren't even covered there.

One incredibly ignorant question: do you use "both sides" of the blade? That is, I feel like it's obviously easier to turn the razor around to shave the opposite sides of my face - so that the side of the blade closest to the skin while shaving one cheek would be away from the skin on the other cheek. But I also somehow got the impression that real straight razors had a preferred "side" for shaving, and that one side should always be against the skin and one side away, no matter where on the face you were shaving. Is that right? If so, how do you hold the razor on the off-hand side?

Another problem: the edge of the blade is flat, but my neck isn't! I find that the blade only touches my skin on the rounded parts of the face at a very narrow fraction of the length of the blade (where it lies tangent to the curve of my neck). Even with the short DE blade, the straight edge of the blade is too long to follow the curve of the surface of the skin. I'm shaving a path only a few millimeters wide with every stroke, and irritating the skin with many repeated strokes. How do you handle this?

A worse problem: I can't seem to do XTG on my neck at all. My neck beard grows straight down the length of my neck. With DE shaving, WTG simply means straight downward, and XTG means straight across - not a problem, especially with a safety razor. But I can't find a way to hold the straight razor comfortably and keep it in contact with the surface of my skin as I go across - particularly in and out of the hollow between my sterno-cleido-mastoid muscle and the trachea. Ideas on that?

I know all this is solvable - you guys are all doing it, and millions of men before me shaved every day in just this way - but I simply can't seem to get the razor to my face in a way that allows a shave! What's the secret?

Thanks.