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Summer is a lull time for IT journalism. Issues get a little bit shorter because there are less new products out there, and manufacturers stop taking you away on exotic trips to show you something they could just as easily have brought into your office.

It’s a period of calm and contemplation in the run up to Christmas, which on our calendar starts in October and comes to an end the second week in January. The October start date is when we get to see all the new products that will be in the shops by December. November is when they take us out for dinners and drinks to remind us how good they are. December is when there are four parties every night as each group of PRs tried to prove it is a better friend than all the others, and January is when the stragglers have their ironic post-Christmas Christmas parties that we’re all too tired to attend.

That’s not to say July and August are dull months, though. I’m busier now than I can ever remember having been in this job in the last six years. It’s just that it is predictable busy-ness (or should that be business?) with predictable deadlines that don’t spring out at you from nowhere.

So why am I still working on my column? I have a dozen half-formed ideas in my head. Some of them collide and would make a great combination, but none of them are quite meaty enough to fill a whole page of text, on which the only distractions are a headline and a goofy pic of my face.

I read a column by Stephen Fry once where he had precisely the same problem. He admitted as much in the opening paragraph, and then went on to do what he freely admitted every writer can only do once in their entire career - he wrote a column about how the column is written. Where he sits, what he uses, when he sends it off and what happens to it between then and the day it appears on the newsagents shelves.

So, what does he do now? Where does he go from here? There’s a lot of years’-worth of writing left inside him, and yet already he’s used up his joker. He has no trump card left to play the next time he’s hard up against a deadline with an empty page and an empty head.

Of course, writing about IT, I could quite legitimately do the same, and talk about the various bits of technology used to get my ideas out of my head and into WHSmith, but can I afford to do that after just ten years?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2003 at 8:58 pm and is filed under Journal, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.