Advice

Emailing links and attachments to editors and producers

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I talk about this quite a bit in The Blank Screen book because it’s a thing. If you’ve never had people sending you massive attachments you may not appreciate quite why it’s a problem. (For one thing, company mailboxes have to have a limited size because there are so many people on staff that it’s expensive to have a lot of space. One multi-megabyte attachment could make the difference and an editor will come in on Monday morning to an inbox that has stopped receiving any new emails after yours.)

Unfortunately it’s a thing that doesn’t have very clear answers. You should definitely wait until an editor or producer has asked you to send material before you do, but does that mean you can’t send anything at all?

Probably.

Today you might reckon you can send a link to something, though. A copy of your script on Dropbox. A showreel of yours on YouTube.

Unfortunately, that’s a thing too. This is why I’m mentioning it today: I just got a reply to an email of mine and the recipient’s network had edited my message. I’d crafted this perfect opening paragraph and instead the first thing she read was this:

Warning: This message contains unverified links which may not be safe. You should only click links if you are sure they are from a trusted source.

I hadn’t intentionally sent her anything; I even had to scroll down to see what links I’d sent.

But there it was. I’d used a signature that included a little cartouche of links about me:

Writer: The Blank Screen, The Beiderbecke Affair, Doctor Who

I shouldn’t have done that. There was no reason she needed to know or that I wanted to tell her, I just used the signature because it also includes my contact details and we were arranging a meeting.

I don’t think you can avoid links today. But you can make them ones that work without having to work, so to speak. That recipient’s network prefixed my message with an ugly warning and others will actually block the message entirely. So only use links when you need to but then also make them immediately useful. For instance, I will sometimes include a link to the page about me on Wikipedia – isn’t that great? that there’s a Wikipedia page about me? – but I’ll do it in a particular way. I’ll say that there is this page and yes, I’ll include the link, but I don’t need the reader to click on it. I don’t even care whether they do: the function of that link is not to send someone to my Wikipedia entry, it is purely to advertise that I have a Wikipedia page about me.

So if you must have a link, find other ways to use it in case they never see it or never click on it. If you must send an attachment, make it one they’ve asked for. And not, please, a fancy graphic logo in your signature.

Don’t update OmniFocus 2 for iPhone yet

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You may not have a choice: I just found that my copy has been updated automatically. Reportedly this update was released “inadvertently” and wasn’t intended to launch until iOS 8 arrives in a few days.

The reason I know this is that the update in the App Store says so. It also says that people have been finding problems with it on iOS 7 and that therefore The Omni Group is working to resolve things.

But in my casual use of OmniFocus 2 for iPhone tonight I’ve not hit any snags. Plus, I’m updating to iOS 8 the instant it’s available so the worst that can happen is that I stick to OmniFocus on my Mac and iPad for a little while.

So. If you can avoid the automatic update, do. If you can’t or you haven’t, hopefully it’s a shrug. But at least you’ll know why if you hit a snag suddenly.

Shrug. Might work. Music to be productive by

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I don’t know. The other day I got into a right Kate Bush mood – it happens to us all – and I did find that I was incapable of playing her music while I worked. Couldn’t let it be playing, I had to listen hard, I simply could not concentrate on anything else.

Naturally, then, I switched her off and went to my old Discoveries playlist. (Don’t click that. It goes to a confessional piece with a long list of music and I am still holding on to the hope that you respect me.)

Allegedly, apparently and reportedly, there are alternatives to music you like. There is music you don’t listen to.

There’s a joke there, but I’m not reaching for it.

Music to be productive by. You can tell I’m not sold. But see what you think: if it works for you, I’ll give it another go.

It gets different

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You’re a writer, this happens to you: you go into a hole. Maybe it’s because you’ve had a big rejection or lot of little ones or maybe it’s just cyclical and the way you are, the way you unfortunately have to be.

I’d like to say that it gets better.

But that’s a bit Hallmark Card-like for me.

So instead, let me offer you this: it gets different.

And that is better.

Plan ahead and lie about it, if necessary

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Here’s the thing. George S Kaufman read John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men when it was published in 1937 and immediately commissioned him to write a theatre version of it. Reportedly Kaufman said: “I don’t know if there’s a dollar in it, but it’s got to be prepared for the stage and Steinbeck’s the man to do it.”

Not only did he buy the rights and commission Steinbeck, he put the writer up at his ranch.

Fine. And especially fine since at some point around then Steinbeck announced: “I don’t go to the theatre much and I don’t know a darn thing about actors.”

But he may have been telling a pork. Like all writers do when necessary, like you need to do a bit more often. Don’t seem needy but do be ready.

For in correspondence with George Albee the year before, Steinbeck said: “It is a tricky little thing designed to teach me to write for the theatre.”

So he was planning a stage version long before he was commissioned. (Does that sound familiar to you at all?) You have to admire his chutzpah but you also have to admire his stage play, which in this 77th year is being revived all over the world – including a production at my favourite, the Birmingham Rep.

Where he may differ from a lot of us is that he didn’t go to see his play. It opened in New York City, it opened on Broadway and it opened to immediate rave reviews and big business, but he didn’t go. Reportedly, he believed that his script was perfect and that any actual production would necessarily be a let down.

Ah, we all think that about our writing.

Don’t seem needy but do be ready. And maybe a bit more modest, I don’t know.

Of Mice and Men is coming to the Birmingham Rep from 10 October to 1 November and you can buy his perfect – I do agree with him – playscript from Amazon here.

What to do when your computer slows down during a job

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Buy a Mac. Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Whatever type of computer you have, there comes a moment when you need to quickly do this particular thing or other and it is taking ages. I don’t know what happens now with Windows, but with a Mac it’s when you get that spinning beach ball.

Given that I keep saying you shouldn’t multitask, am I really going to say you should stay looking at that beach ball instead of going off to do something else?

A little bit.

Partly because, yes, multitasking is that bad for you. The time it takes you to switch over to a different task, mentally, is equal to the time it takes you to switch back and both times are huge. Much worse than you imagine.

So I would stare at the beach ball for a fair while before I’d be better off doing something else.

But there is another reason. Very often, if our computer is slow saving a Word document, say, then we’ll nip over to Mail on it. And now that’s slow. So we just open that graphic that we need to tweak in Photoshop. And what do you know, dammit, now Photoshop is slow.

Whatever was causing the original slow down, we are compounding it by turning to different tasks on our computer. So if we’d just stood sitting there, we wouldn’t be distracted, we wouldn’t be slowing down our computer and we wouldn’t therefore be getting frustrated at how everything seems slow now.

I just don’t know how long to give that.

I do know that sometimes I should really restart the whole machine and that if I do, things will work better. Taking the time to restart is hard but it can be worth it, you can repay that time soon.

But in the meantime, here’s a shorter answer to the problem: try a little patience, it’s worth the effort.

The Not-We

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If you should stop beating yourself up when you fail to get as much done as you planned, you should certainly pat yourself on the back for doing stuff. We don’t do that and if you want to really appreciate how important it is, how much it matters, then work with someone who fails.

Last month I did a thing that I reckoned would take me an hour’s research and up to two hours writing. No more. There are lots of reasons why I took it on, including that it was fun, but the fact that it would be swift was a big factor.

It wasn’t swift.

It required working with another writer and I thought I was ready for this. Even when they failed the first time, I shrugged: I knew what would happen. Sure enough, I got the predictable excuse email when they hadn’t done the work, the one you read going yeah, yeah, so when am I going to get it? The thing with predictable stuff is that they’re not surprising so I was narked but not surprised.

The nark/surprise ratio did not improve.

I don’t care about the excuse – if it were that someone had died, okay, but this wasn’t even at the level of pets chewing pages. I can well imagine that the writer has more important things to do. I can well agree too. She is far more important to the project than I am, far more, and she has more jobs to do in it than I ever will.

But all I see is that her job is to do what she agreed to do.

I think that’s simple and if you can’t do it, don’t agree. If you agreed but then can’t do it, say so.

I wasted a lot of time on that project and it was true waste: the waste where you are left waiting with nothing to do. It was brilliant for every other project I was working on, but I could’ve been working on those straight through if she’d just said.

All the stuff we do about being creatively productive is meant to help us, ourselves, we. You and me. We work better, we handle things better, we do more things better. But it also helps other people enormously when we do what we say we’ll do and we do it when we said we would.

And last month I was other people. I’ve left it five weeks in order to cool down about it and to make it so that I can convincingly say “no, no, it was this other project” if anyone from that gig reads this. I’m still not cool about it but no, no, it was this other project.

Video: “Backing up your brain with Evernote”

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First you think Evernote is just another notebook app. Then you wonder how you use it. Next thing you know, you are completely incapable of living without it – or able to explain to anyone why it’s so great.

The Verge has a good go. If you’re havering over whether to Evernote then the short answer is yes, do it. The slightly longer answer – about 5’46” – is this:

Note that the mobile version of Evernote has been somewhat radically updated since the one you see here and I like it much more.

Todoist Premium on special offer (briefly)

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As featured in this week’s email newsletter, you can currently get a free six months subscription to the premium version of Todoist.

The deal is via Appsumo, it’s here and it’s worth looking at – but before you buy, check out the free version. It may well be all you need in which case Premium is a waste of your money. It’s a nice waste, mind: you’d be supporting the firm that makes this To Do app you so like, but still.

When you follow that Appsumo link, scroll down. The front page looks like a big ad for Appsumo but it’s just the top: scroll down for a lot of detail about Todoist.

Taking the scorched Earth policy to your social media

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I belong to that exclusive Twitter club, not users who have been “verified” (curse their privileged names) but users who have hit the daily tweet limit, the social-media equivalent of getting cut off by the bartender. The few, the proud, the badly in need of help.

Reboot or Die Trying – David Roberts, Outside (2 September 2014)

That’s serious social media use. I had no idea that there even was a daily limit on Twitter. But after hitting it and generally just going far too far on all of these things, Roberts quit. Cold turkey, near enough, for a year.

He claims to have five things to tell you, five things that you can only know from having a year away from technology – or, presumably, reading about it.

I’d tell you some of the five but this is on Outside magazine. Outside. I barely know what the word means. Read the full feature and if it’s that crucial, let me know.