A writer's look at the writing industry and the Internet.

The weekend on-call,
risk of sleep deprivation.
Kills desire to write.

Part of my day job involves being on-call for one weekend in every 6-8 weeks to fill in the gaps between our 24-hour “follow the sun” customer model when the North American team finishes their Friday afternoon and the Asia-Pacific team starts their Monday morning. It’s easily the worst part of my job which, as far as things go in workplaces, means it’s a pretty good job.

My first week on-call saw my first call-out occur at 1:00am Saturday morning and took 3 hours to fix. The next call came in at 5:00am and took 4 hours, during which another call came in at 7:00am so had to work two emergencies concurrently. By 11:00pm Saturday evening I was beginning to panic as it was clear the calls were going to continue, many being worked in parallel, I’d had no sleep since Thursday night, and I was working at 100% workload. It continued until 6:00am Monday (before we had the Asia-Pacific team)… and I had to be in the office for 9:00am. Your mind starts to do weird things in that kind of situation, and I can honestly say that I have some idea of what sleep deprivation torture is all about. (Though such victims tend not to get paid for the experience and it’s not done by their employers).

That experience was almost five years ago and I’m pleased to say that this weekend on-call was nothing like that first one (in fact, nobody in the company has ever seen a weekend like that). But living with that possibility stifles all creativity, so this weekend was spent watching DVDs and, perversely, waiting for Monday. On the plus side, I’ve now finally seen George Romero’s Dead trilogy — which was purely for research on the zombie story I’m writing, you understand…

Now it’s Tuesday and the juices are flowing again!

Tried new software to
write more productively, but
it ate all my work!

Tomorrow is the deadline for the Spring edition of a magazine that I’ve been interested in submitting something to for a while now, called The First Line, as mentioned in an earlier post. I nearly chose not to write something for this edition, as I’m not a big fan of writing on religious themes, but I found a way around it and decided to give it a go.

As I had all afternoon and evening available, I decided to try out a new piece of writing software I bought this weekend that’s designed to make you more productive, the desktop edition of Write Or Die! (US$10). It’s written in Adobe AIR (familiar to most Twitter users) and — along with the expected text input area and ability to save as plain text — it will give you a progress bar if you specify the number of words or the amount of time (or both) that you want to write in that session, and it has a few options that will first prod you or even punish you, if you want. Not a bad motivational tool, as you find yourself typing continually to avoid the flashing and noise, while avoiding self-editing, and it’s easy to churn out words with little effort.

Or so the theory goes. Cutting a long story short, after using it to write a story that I was quite pleased with, I saved it over a file of the same name (no big deal, the operating system should ask me if I’m sure, etc, and do it seamlessly), exited the program and opened the file in an editor to discover that the save I’d just made didn’t happen. I don’t know what went wrong, but none of it got saved: 1200 words and 45 minutes flushed away.

I was not a happy bunny at all. I’m not pointing my finger at the software, as I really don’t know what went wrong and where. It could have been the software, it could have been AIR, or it could have been me, I just don’t know. Besides, it’s not like it was a novel.

So after making a cup of tea to regain my composure, I set about to writing it again, with as much of it from memory as possible. This time I used another piece of software that I’ve been meaning to use properly for some time: OmmWriter (watch the demo video, it’s stunning). It’s currently only available for the Mac, it’s free, and it uses a Zen-like atmosphere to stop you from getting distracted. It’s a beautiful looking piece of software and does the job very well.

The story has now been fully written, imported into OpenOffice.org for formatting, edited and improved, saved as a Word document (per their submission guidelines), and submitted for their consideration. Now begins the waiting game…

Borrowing an idea from a friend’s website, here’s a bit of fun to sum up today’s writing: