h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm a writer. I write ads, brochures, and occasionally, web sites.

Or, rather, I put off writing ads, brochures and the occasional web site for a certain period of time deciding instead to write emails to friends and strangers about various subjects and to check for replies or surf the web, or play guitar or write short essays on lawn mowers or gay adoption.

This is not a healthy or productive work style, but it does make me feel loved and prolific and part of the great continuum of Man.

Mozart once described the process of composing a symphony as something that happened in an instant within his mind and most of the work involved transcribing what appeared in his gray matter to a page with five lines and a lot of dots and dashes. To me, writing is much the same. Perhaps not as instantaneous or as impeccable or artistically perfect, but, still, I do not write anything until all of my points are firmly in my head and ready to be spit out. Vomited is more accurate.

Writing--the act itself, is both pleasurable and excruciatingly painful. I love the creativity and expressiveness of it. I hate the technical and physical nature of getting words to appear on a computer screen.

Plus, for me, writing involves chaos that’s dancing around order. I know what I want to write and the tone in which I want to write it, but how the words actually come out in the end is really chaotic and often unexpected.

I have this bizarre style of editing myself as I write. I'll start out with a sentence in mind--this one is an excellent example--and I will edit it as I type, making changes before, during and after I have written it. (That last sentence was originally to read "I edit myself as I write." And I made no fewer than five changes to it as I typed it.)

I work alone. Right now, I work in a tiny cottage in the woods on Nantucket Island. (Someday I will write about Nantucket for the Guide, but not right away) Said cottage is rocket shaped from the front and quite rectangular and unremarkable from the side--a skinny little cartoon of a house, with a drastically steep roofline that, truth be told, does not meet the local building codes for pitch. Not my problem. I'm grandfathered in.

My workspace is located just 150 feet from my home which provides a nice buffer zone between me and my loud children, and allows me advanced warning of visitors who are walking up my long, narrow lane to the front door of my office. That way, I can stop playing a violent computer game or surfing the web in enough time to give the illusion that I am actually working.

When I am under a tight deadline and I really need to be productive, I work at home an under the watchful eye of my wife, who stays at home all day. The distractions are fewer there, and with my wife in the same building, even if I wanted to play a quick game of Oni, or surf the internet for new wireless devices I will never, ever buy, I couldn't, or else be subjected to derrision and rolling of eyes (ROE)

ROE is a fantastic productivity tool which was taught to her by the account supervisor at her former ad agency--the place she worked before she became a mother.

Some might say that she does not work today, but she works far harder than I. Unfortunately, she has yet to find anyone to pay her for that work, whereas I am compensated nicely for the very small amount of work I do. Enough to pay a mortgage for a house that sits on an island that is officially the most expensive place to live in the US, and perhaps the world.

My work, thankfully, is a concentrated kind of work. It is extra strength and distilled by years of experience and a highly lazy mind. I may go several days without doing anything billable. Then, bang, I'll fly off island for a meeting, have a concept session with an art director and then hit a recording studio to edit a radio spot for seven hours. Bang. Three to four thousand dollars appears in my bank account (After sending out bills and waiting 30 to 90 days). At my billable rate, which is not too high and not too low, I can work six full days in a month and bill enough to pay my monthly expenses.

Imagine if I worked 30. I could take the next five months off.

Why don't I, then? Because the work does not come in with that kind of regularity. Projects start and stop. There are periods of waiting for collaborators and clients to get their acts together. And time between billable hours is miraculously filled up with phone calls, emails, computer games, guitar strumming, surfing the web and writing this journal entry.

That is my work style. Such as it is.