After many years of blogging, and consistent with my desire to move toward retirement, we have ended the Insights blog. Thanks to Doug Bedell for his years of blog support.

My Shrinking World

Posted on February 23, 2010
Filed Under The Writing Life | Leave a Comment

Just a week or so ago I was thinking about some travel.  I have friends in Missouri I haven’t seen in ages, and I’d really like to get back to Salt Lake City.  I used to live a few hours away and I always enjoyed that city.  With my current writing project wrapping up in a month or so and only some vague outlines of where the next one will be, it seemed like the perfect time for a road trip.

Then I spent a good chunk of last Saturday in the ER.  Why is not important.  Suffice it to say that until things get sorted out, alone on the road a thousand miles from home and loved ones seems suddenly less attractive.

I think about my situation and can’t help but draw some contrasts.  My son is studying in Europe and as I write this he is between semesters and on a month-long adventure:  Istanbul, Vienna, Berlin, Cologne, Dresden, Hamburg, Leipzig, and more.  With my money and his rail pass, his world is very large indeed…thousands of miles.  My mother died of Alzheimer’s disease, and in the last year of her life her world was measured in feet… a very few feet.

I intend to rage against my shrinking world.  Bold talk from a guy who a few days ago was hoping to have the chance to make the two-mile trip back home.  I wonder if I’ll have the courage to venture far from the illusory safety of a shrunken world? – Dennis Owen

‘No Thank You’

Posted on January 29, 2010
Filed Under The Writing Life | Leave a Comment

I’ve been a contract technical writer for over 20 years, so I’m used to the ebb and flow of new clients and new projects.  I say that, but I have to acknowledge the rumbling in the gut that arises when the phone isn’t ringing and the email in-box contains little more than the Viagra solicitations that made it past the spam filter.

Those dry spells suddenly loom large as you forget all the interesting and lucrative projects you’ve enjoyed, and instead watch the number in the lower right corner of the corporation’s QuickBooks Cash Account ledger drift downward.  It’s usually about that time, with prospects looking dim, that the phone rings and you hear something like the following:

•  “My Master’s thesis is due at the end of the month and I need some writing and editing help.”

•  “Do you do resumes?”

•  “I’ve finished the first few chapters of my book and I think I need an editor.”

•  “I need help with my business plan… uh, my budget is tight so can I pay part now and the balance when I land my start-up funding?’

Your mind instantly does the calculation.  What the hell, I’m not very busy.  This guy surely can’t pay my hourly rate, but if I cut the rate he might go for it, and at least I’d be billing a little.  Yes, my last writing project was a six-month stint at GE writing about laser-induced isotope separation, and while this guy’s project isn’t technical I’d be helping someone… and remember, even Steve Jobs needed startup help at some point.

I laugh (no make that shudder) now when I think about how many times I went down that path early in my career.  Only once, as I’ll explain below, have those calls ever been worth the ensuing headaches of handholding and 60 day late payments.  Now when those calls come in I say “No thank you” but in my own way.  I hear out the caller and ask a few questions.  I explain that my business is highly technical writing and then I tell them my hourly rate.  Most promise to think about it and call back.  Knowing they won’t, I also turn to my list of local novice writers and resume services and offer a few names.  I’m invariably polite and thank them for contacting ENCORE (Christian kindness is free and maybe they’ll remember me when that crazy business plan lands VC funding).

The one time it worked?  A woman called in the middle of a very bad dry spell wanting help writing an award acceptance speech she had to make at a national fraternal organization’s convention.  We went through the usual conversation and she promised to think about it and call back, and darned if the next day she did.  I interviewed her for the speech, and over coffee in her living room I met a wonderful, kind, and accomplished woman.  I prepared the draft, we tweaked it together, I emailed her the final, and I had a check two days later.  She called to say the speech was a success, and son of a gun if she didn’t call me two months later to write another.

You’re a technical writer.  Stick to your knitting and learn to say “No thank you.”  But be alert for that rare and delightful exception to the rule. – Dennis Owen

The Vacation of Technical Writing

Posted on January 28, 2010
Filed Under The Writing Life | Leave a Comment

Wipe that smug look off your face… you didn’t catch this technical writer misspelling “Vocation.” The word “Vacation” is intentional and entirely appropriate.

As a contract technical writer I have traveled a lot. It’s one of the perks of what I do.  It’s less hard on the family now that the children are grown, so I tend to do more of it and in fact I seek out interesting assignments in interesting places.

I have some wonderful memories of my writing “vacations.”  I’ve prowled an amazing used book store a few miles from Texas A&M University.  I’ve partied at a Moscow restaurant with Russian engineers watching barely-clad showgirls through a vodka-induced haze.  I’ve returned from a “hard” day of writing and walked to a lake a hundred feet from the front door of my apartment in Virginia and fly fished for bass until it was too dark to see the fly.  I’ve called my wife from the beach in La Jolla to tell her it is 70 degrees and the skies are blue, and she’s told me it’s twenty below, the pipes are frozen, and maybe it would be a good idea for me to get my ass home.  I’ve worked on the set of a simulated nuclear plant control room on a sound stage in Pittsburgh—surrounded by the set of Mister Roger’s Neighborhood—making last-minute edits to a videotape script.  I’ve been welcomed like a long-lost relative by the hospitable folks at a Virginia church.  During the last few years of my father’s life, when my work took me to the San Francisco Bay Area, I’d stay with him in my childhood home and we’d just talk the evening away.  And my wife and I have turned writing assignments into real vacations; a week in Vienna, a warm mid-winter stay in Florida, and more.

Even the writing projects close to home are vacations.  Invariably, you make new friends, learn about new (to you) technologies, lunch at new restaurants with your colleagues, and generally expand your horizons.

Do you write?  If so, you are a lucky man or woman… count your blessings and enjoy your vacations. – Dennis Owen

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