I’m checking out time zones.
As I explained in a post a few days back, I’m going to do a public writing experiment – I’ll write using Google Documents and share the link with the public, so that you will be able to look over my shoulder as I do it.

I do not know if it will work, but I am willing to try.
With a modicum of luck, it should take me about five hours to do the trick.
Or I will crash and burn, who knows.

I got the idea from Harlan Ellison – because if you have to steal from someone, you better steal from a good one. There is an article out there, Ellison being interviewed by Jessica Savitch in 1981 after one of his public writing sessions…

SAVITCH: Is this the first time that you have written anything of this nature under less than ideal conditions?

ELLISON: No as a matter of fact I’ve done this a number of times. I’ve done it in London in a bookstore window. I did it in Los Angeles in a bookstore there. I did 6 stories in 6 days sitting in the bookstore window to help promote the bookstore. I find that the stories, some of them, about seven of them have won awards. So there’s no real difference from the stories I write quietly in my office at home, or in a window. It doesn’t bother me.

SAVITCH: So its partially a publicity gimmick and partially because you want to show people that you don’t have to sit on a mountaintop in quiet and solitude and think and then write.

ELLISON: Its also like George Willett climbing the World Trade Towers, I like doing it because it’s hard to do and it’s always nice to do something that seems impossible and difficult just to prove you can do it.

I like the last bit.
Writing is hard and it’s fun, and there is no strange mumbo jumbo apart from sitting down and typing while your ideas run (hopefully) faster than your fingers.
Oh, you’ll see my typos, my get-it-wrong/cancel/rewrite routine, and my infamous let’s cut this from here and paste it there. It will be horrible.
But no matter if it works out and I’ll have a 3000-words story ready to submit somewhere (after a modicum of editing) or if it will be a total train wreck, the public will be entertained.

So I’ll start this weekend, and the first show, on Saturday, will be in English for my readers on Karavansara – yes, you, dear readers. Next week I’ll do it for my Italian readers on my Italian blog, strategie evolutive.

The only problem now, for the Saturday show, is finding an hour – considering what we have here is a pretty international crowd.

After much deliberation and time-zone map perusal, I think I will start at midnight here, 11 PM UTC (sometimes suffering from insomnia is a good thing), on Saturday night.
This should allow readers across the Atlantic to follow me in the late afternoon of Saturday, and my Asia-Oceania followers to take a peek over my (digital) shoulder while they have breakfast on Sunday morning. My Italian followers could still drop in as they come home from the movies or a night out on Saturday night.
Everyone’s happy.
Hopefully.

At midnight, UTC+1 on Saturday I will post on Karavansara a link to my shared document. I might also post it on Facebook and Twitter, I guess.
So, watch this space.
Are you going to drop in? I hope you will.
Have some ideas, suggestions, opinions that might help? Please use the comments and let me know.