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WORK HAZARDS

Most writers prefer to go straight to work on their computer, right after checking their email. (Reading email and feasting on spam —the gratuitous messaging from persons or humanoids to whom we haven’t been formally introduced — can occupy a writer fully until it is time for a coffee break).

The distraction of email, along with surfing the Internet, enables the writer to delay, or possibly avoid entirely, the serious work of composition. It is possible to email the same information to hundreds of people — family, friends, even total strangers — which is a level of market saturation the writer may never match with his other written work. His reward is, of course, not financial but the gratitude of the email recipients, who read it as an excuse for delaying or avoiding their own work.

It is conservatively estimated that email, worldwide, eliminates more millions of hours of useful toil than any recreation since the golf course.

It is normal to fake indignation at having our time wasted by persons to whom we aren’t related by blood or natural bonding. A writer may actually go straight from his email to creating a graphic scene of murder, or sadistic sex, with renewed zest.

Another reliable source of distraction is your printer. This device has come a long way since William Caxton, in fifteenth-century England, created a new source of typographical errors: printing. Today’s home printer has vastly increased the number of ways in which something can go wrong. It also vomits paper at a rate that is accelerating the deforestation of the planet. Most of these pages are blank, for reasons known only to the printer, and of course the printer repairman, who has replaced our other relationships.

As for your copier/fax machine, forget about sex — this is the only reproduction you can afford.