Chris Orcutt, Writer

Once upon a time, there was a writer. He lived in a small house in the country, and each day when he finished his work, he would walk his little town, saying hello to all of the wonderful people—the postman, the fireman, the doctor, the grocer. Life was very good for the writer.

Each day, when the writer edited that morning's work, he printed out the pages, put them on a clipboard and went through the material with a red pen. The red pen was a nasty throwback to his teaching days, but he liked it because he could always see marks made in red. The writer, you see, was slightly colorblind.

Clipboard in hand, the writer would go to his neighborhood diner and drink 3-4 cups of coffee while editing his work. Stimulated by the din of his fellow townsfolk, the writer often came up with insightful edits, and in some cases whole new scenes. The diner was always where the writer outlined and planned a piece of writing. Maybe it was the worn Formica tabletops, maybe it was the comfort of being in a place where everyone knew him and left him alone. Whatever it was, the writer liked it.





Once finished at the diner, the writer went on his long daily walk and returned home to his snug, gold-painted office with the fancy desktop computer. When he was younger, the writer had always fantasized about having a real home office with a door that closed, but the gods had never blessed him this way. Now, however, the writer had a marvelous space in which to work, with two computers, two typewriters, two printers, and a dedicated hard drive for backing up his work.

Merrily would the writer enter his edits into the computer. With each line he entered, the writer pressed CMD-S to save his work. Not that it mattered because the fancy computer also auto-saved his work every 2 minutes. And each day's work was saved with a suffix, thusly: MY_WRITING_MMDDYY.

At the end of each day, the writer would upload his finished work to his best friend's server. The best friend was profoundly generous and gave freely of his bounty of bandwidth and mass storage capability. And all the friend ever asked for in exchange was some cash when the writer had it and the occasional case of non-alcoholic Pinot Noir grape juice.

Nothing could impinge on the writer's world.

So the writer grew smug, smug in the belief that he had shielded himself from any possible disaster.

"Fires and floods and tornadoes and blizzards—blow, wrack and rage!" the writer yelled. "Fuck you all! I'm covered!"

Meanwhile, Zeus and his daughters, the Muses, did not take kindly to the writer's arrogance. For years they had immersed him in a delightful fog of never-ending inspiration. One of Zeus's daughters, a comely redhead, was especially hurt by the writer's haughtiness because she was the one who had been charged with ensuring the safety of the writer's work. And now for the writer to suggest that it was technology—mere flecks of silicon—that was protecting him....

The redheaded goddess seethed.