Let’s give a warm welcome to my new partner-in-crime, Lena Webb. Lena’s new to this blog, but our shared shenanigans go WAY back (like, pre-boob). She’s smart, loves sherry, has mad photo skills, is funny as hell, and, DESPITE being awesome at basically everything, still enjoys a good terrible Lifetime movie. For her first post, Lena decided to give OmmWriter – “your own private writing room” (non-douchy translation: a word processing app) – a try. Enjoy! – Attempted Blogger

“The experience would be better with headphones?” I actually think the experience would be better if I didn’t have a crushing hangover and I wasn’t typing total bullshit on some moody gray watercolor e-paper. Oh well, here we go.

At least it’s not telling me the word “hangover” is misspelled because I might have to throw my monitor on the ground and piss on its shattered… shattered what? Am I supposed to type things like “visage” in this thing? And how am I supposed to feed my adult-onset Internet ADD with this fully-immersive writing landscape in the way? Can I tweet this? Share it somehow? Or is it just for me and me the alone– a terrifying thought. We’re supposed to immediately share everything we write now, duh OmmWriter; we get itchy if we don’t.  So far I’m feeling like I’m giving a TED Talk by typing on the walls of a padded cell that is my brain.  Time to hunker down.

My keyboard is so old that the pleasant and efficient little clicky sound effects are lost in all my poundings. I just put on “music option #3” and it’s the sound of a rickety locamotive passing by. I wonder how many terrible McSweeney’s submissions subconsciously involve rickety locomotives. Would you look at that; I’ve spent so much time with the spellcheck crutch stuffed under my pit that I’m not sure how to spell loca/omotive. Of course OmmWriter doesn’t have spellcheck. I could cry. We’ll call it a train.

Who decided that constant train noise helps you write, anyway?

There seems to be a more powerful train coming now so I’m going to switch musics. #4 has such thumpy bass that I will change it soon. It shakes my desk. It is raining in the background, and there is some escalating emo crap guitar playing really simple repetitive shit– and now there are drums? Is this karaoke? Something just fell of my desk so I’m changing it now. NOT conducive to writing. To avoid describing all the womb-y music I just sampled, I’ll just lay it down: it turns out that the train is the best option. You know, for writing.

I can’t even see my clock. I have no idea when I should be getting ready for work. Is this what writers are supposed to do? Lose track of time, lose their jobs, and retreat into a mental landscape of fiction to avoid the consequences? Tempt-ing! I bet writers should also be drinking wine (check!) at 12:30 pm (check!) in their bathrobes (check!) with a cat  on their laps(check!).

OmmConfession: I just broke away from the writing landscape to make some toast (since I just realized I was drinking wine without having had any breakfast) and I saw that my backyard was alive with Life. Birds were flying this way and that, chirping up a storm. They weren’t listening to a fake train, typing nonsense! The whole thing made me regret Humanity, and deeply so.

And yet here I am, back again; drawn in by the lonesome rumble of this fake train that constantly blocks my passage over to the Internet on the other side, reminding me that my thoughts are my own and that it doesn’t matter how I spell the things I think.

It sounds like I may be softening on the whole experience, doesn’t it? Well maybe that’s just because the rumbling train is making me sleepy and I have the urge to crawl back in bed and imagine a simpler time when controlling my bowels didn’t matter. I mean, as I’m winding down with this “uncomplicated” writing experience, already I’m wondering horrible things such as “what file format will this be saved as?” (a hideous PDF!) and “what did I just spend almost an hour doing?” (nothing!) and “soon, Lena, you’ll need pants” (but I’m only 30!).

The train just came to a stop (!) and now I hear OmmBirds and perhaps an OmmHighway in the distance. Is this the end? The end of writing? Should I stop writing now?

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OmmAuthor’s note: I stopped and made it to work on time.  The application’s website told me I should “reconnect with my old friends Concentration and Creativity” but didn’t mention anything about my casual acquaintances Sobriety, Spelling, Pants, and Employment. Sure, I get what it’s trying to do, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Also, I discovered that OmmWriter quietly fails at its lofty goal of helping me “re-discover the bliss of single-tasking” as there is a distraction-riddled and completely weird social network linked from the app’s main site called “the playroom” where you can indeed tweet/tumbl/facebook/e-mail your experience in the three weird realms that the OmmWriters have chosen: re-writing a sign, soliciting random advice from OmmWriter employees, or being inspired by a stream of random sentences like “a lonely, bisexual kayak.”. You can also leave comments like this one: “There should be a space after the comma on ‘…the finest fabrics,to make you…’. I have an ocd on this kind of things.” 

And then you can go jerk off to the TED Talk I’ll be giving about my brilliant novel, The Konfused Kayak.