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February 23, 2005
Shut the door, paint the windows black
This from an MTV.com article on HST's suicide:
The way he actually cranked out the copy, as he said in a 1974 Playboy interview, was quite basic. "One day you just don't appear at the El Adobe bar anymore: You shut the door, paint the windows black, rent an electric typewriter and become the monster you always were — the writer."
It parallels my experiences of writing software pretty well. Programmers block, perhaps. Hours, days, weeks of pointless staring at a screen, pecking listlessly at the keyboard, randomly clicking in the IDE with the mouse, drinking too much coffee, engaging in displacement behaviours (like blogging) followed by a deep visceral anger at yourself, the computer, the world for being so useless. Sometimes, pulling an all-nighter recovers (or partially redeems) all that ... sometimes. Never tried painting the windows black, though ... hmmm ...
Posted by daen at February 23, 2005 02:16 PM