Typographical Procrastination
Yesterday lunchtime I discovered quite by chance that the latest beta of Scrivener for Windows doesn't crash in quite the same way the old version used to – which means I'll be going back on last week's dramatic pronouncement that “Scrivener is dead to me”, and trying to convince everybody that I never said it in the first place.
While playing with the new version of Scrivener – which is quite lovely – I lucked into a quite accidental procrastination black hole. Fonts.
Who knew that choosing a font to use while writing would be so important? I certainly didn't – until I started changing the font, typing a few words, changing it again, and so on. I even did a Google search for “font recommendations for writing”, and ended up reading countless discussions in forums about which fonts people like to use while writing, and why. It turns out lots of people have given this lots of thought in the past.
This is all a tactic of course. If I tinker with the font, it looks like I'm getting ready to write something. Just like I bought the laptop, installed it with this operating system, that software, and the other backup strategy – it all avoided me actually writing anything.
Do blog posts count as “anything”? I think they do. Of course I'm telling myself that so I don't have to confront the slightly guilty fact that I haven't really written anything of consequence for the better part of fifteen years – just like I haven't really drawn anybody or anything since leaving art college twenty eight years ago.
I'm good at procrastinating. I wish it was a valid skill to list on a CV. If you were hiring somebody to make sure your department achieved very little – a problem I'm sure most politicians face on a regular basis – it would be really useful if you could more easily find the most useless people.