The Chicken of Time: Gillian Philip

It all started with Charlie Brooker. As someone who was frittering away much of his time on Facebook and Twitter (there are many of us - mea maxima culpa) he needed something to focus his attention on the paying job in hand. If you haven't read it already, his article on the Pomodoro Technique (the solution he discovered) is almost painfully sharp and funny. As he put it, "I was trying to write a script in a small room with nothing but a laptop for company. Perfect conditions for quiet contemplation - but thanks to the accompanying net connection, I may as well have been sharing the space with a 200-piece marching band."

Ouch. The article, Google Instant is Trying to Kill Me, was all over the writery part of Facebook in the time it takes to get up for another cup of coffee and idly check Twitter.

I already know people who are trying it out, and swearing by it. Kathryn Evans, fellow children's writer, has not vanished from the online world - not at all - in fact, she's posting just as often. But she's only visiting the gossipy virtual water cooler every twenty-five minutes, when her chicken timer tells her she may. For five minutes. And then it clucks again.

She's getting a lot of work done.

I don't think Twitter and Facebook are a waste of time. They're sanity-saving, they're mines of research and news and ideas, they're wonderful places to meet and talk about work, and they're places where I've met some of my very best friends.

None of which stops them being vampires of work-time. I'm going out today. I may be some time, but I'll have more of it when I get back. I'm going to hunt for my very own chicken.

http://www.gillianphilip.com/

A Happy Catastrophe - John Dougherty

A couple of weeks ago, I did something stupid. Really stupid. Really, really, really, really stupid. So stupid that I’d always assumed I was nowhere near stupid enough to do it.

It appears I was wrong.

What I did was: I accidentally and permanently erased about half a novel-in-progress from my computer.

Reader, I cannot begin to describe to you the icy sweat that broke over my brow as I realised the sheer stupidness of the stupidity of the stupid thing I had just done. Well - I could, but you’d have to remove the family-safe filters from your browser to be able to read it. It was truly, truly horrible. Weeks of work down the pan. A good story fatally truncated, potentially forever.

I ran to the house and called my friend Marc, who knows considerably more than I do about Apple computers. He had some words of comfort. It was possible that the document was still on my hard drive somewhere. He gave me some software that might help.

I couldn’t load it.

At this point, I made the decision to write off the loss. It was still possible that I could have retrieved my lost work, but it was starting to look as if it would be quicker just to rewrite the thing. So I decided to do just that.

Now, those brave souls who have stuck with me this far will be saying: clearly this was the catastrophe, but where’s the happy bit?

Well, this was a happy catastrophe because it made me realise that I’d recently fallen into some very bad writing habits. I’d been letting other things get in the way of my writing much too much.

But losing so much of this first draft focused the old grey matter in a rather extraordinary way. It reminded me that, actually... I’m a writer. My job, my occupation, the thing that I do, is to write stories for children. All the other stuff that gets in the way is just, well, stuff that gets in the way.

So I put everything else aside. All those little distractions that’ll “only take a minute” instead took no time at all, because I didn’t do them. I got straight to work, and worked solidly. When that familiar little voice in the back of my head began to suggest that perhaps I was a bit stuck and should take a break, I ignored it and ploughed on. When I got that nagging feeling that there were other things I had to do, I reminded myself that I had to do this, and I kept writing. And in only two days, I’d rewritten the lost portion.

Better still, I was able to keep the momentum going. Another day and zooosh! - I’d completed the story. At the pre-catastrophe rate of progress, it should have taken another couple of weeks at least; but now, with my new awareness of my bad habits and the distractions that might have plagued me, I was once more writing at top speed.

So, that’s the story of my happy catastrophe - a reminder that every cloud really does have a silver lining.

At least, I hope it does, because three days later the publisher I’d been aiming this story at rejected it without actually having read it. Humph. When I find the silver lining in that one, I’ll let you know.

John's website is at www.visitingauthor.com

I'll be offline for a few days, so won't be able to join in any discussion in the comments, but I'll look forward to reading them when normal broadband is restored. Oh, and I now have a shiny new external hard drive and am backing everything up regularly...

SHOCK REVELATION: I Am Not Mrs Dale - Lucy Coats

Like John Dougherty yesterday, I was going to write about something different.  Not a Kindle (I don't have one...yet), but the furore around Bookstart.  However, John has done such an excellent job of it that he's left me with nothing to say--except that I agree with him about many things, not least of which is that 2011 is going to be a year of standing up (or sitting in) and shouting. 

So.  What to write about at the beginning of this new year? I think a confession is probably in order.  You lot always seem to like my confessions, and indeed I have a multitude of sins to confess. Here goes....

I am a failure.  I've been a failure for nearly half a century, or at least ever since I was old enough to write a comprehensible sentence.  And before you start in with the soothing rebuttals of this rather startling statement, I don't actually mean as a writer. I think I'm reasonably good at that.  What I mean is that I am a failure as a diarist.  In other words, Mrs Dale I am not.

I've tried more times than I can count to keep one. When I was a child, without fail some aunt or godparent would give me a diary for Christmas--once even a magnificent red leather-bound 5-year one.  I started off every time on 1st January with hope that this time, this time I would do it.  I would write something about my life every single day of the year till I reached the milestone of 31st December.  I failed every time.  In fact, the longest I ever lasted was till March 15th, a measly two-and-a-half months.

In later life--after I became a full-time writer--I tried in other ways.  I tried to write a journal.  I tried to write a dream book.  I even tried to write a poem diary.  The poems were quite good, but there are only ten of them.  There just seems to be a little part of my brain which is a rebel, which says: "this is really boring.  Your mundane daily life is boring. Who's going to want to read about all that stuff like how the maths teacher shouted at you again for being stupid over trigonometry (a frequent childhood event), or how your university tutor made you smoke pot as part of your 'education', or what it was like for a young editor in 80's New York, or how it felt to fly out of Ladakh eight days before they closed the borders to the West, or...or...."  Yes. I know.  Those things might all be of interest to future generations of my family or the wider world.  But it's the bits in between I have trouble with. The days when nothing happens except a trip to the supermarket or doing the housework or the school run.  That's when I lose the will to write a diary.

However this year, 2011, is the year of my half century.  Surely 50 years on the planet deserves recording in some way.  So I'm going to try again.  I have it all planned out.  I shall have a 'secret diary blog' which I shall write once a week, recording the events and thoughts of the last seven days.  Actually, I've already started it.  Will I succeed?  Yes.  I bloody well will. And you can quote me on that come December 31st.  If you remember.