Despite this blog’s title, neither of the two links I’m about to throw out here have anything to do with writing your name in the snow by urinating, so if you’re looking for that, you’ll have to try somewhere else.

But if you’re any sort of writer, and especially the sort of writer toiling away north of Fort Severn, you might want to pay attention. While utterly inapplicable to myself, the Ontario Arts Council has added an extra deadline for their Writers’ Works in Progress program specifically for professional writers based in Northern Ontario. This particular Northern Competition is a one-year pilot program for the OAC aiming to grant $12,000 living subsidies to writers producing book-length works who fall within the OAC’s defined Northeast, Northwest and Far North regions: in short, anywhere in the vast openness of the province once you’ve kicked it further up than Haliburton.

As far as granting initiatives go, it’s certainly not the first to target specifically rural or isolated populations, but remains an interesting move in that it otherwise mimics an existing OAC grant opportunity while limiting the field of competition to a geographical area clearly disadvantaged by limited professional resources. One wonders what other initiatives might expand the field of opportunity for artists in other under-served parts of the province - you know, like anywhere that isn’t Toronto.

For those of us forced to toil in that other wasteland that is city living, there aren’t any new funding sources to be had that I know of, but if you work on a Mac (and really, why aren’t you?) there’s always OmmWriter. This elegant little thing was recommended to me by Matt Sparling, a good friend and kick-ass photographer with whom I wrote an email correspondence during my time at Glasgow the girth of which would make Tolstoy faint. Needless to say, Matt knows how to write but like me is easily frustrated by the damn machine getting in the way of the words - if Microsoft Word tries to correct my made-up English one more time, I’m gonna slap that bitch to next week. What OmmWriter proposes instead is a basic, uncluttered interface that lets you pour words onto an utterly blank screen that whites out everything else save a few pretty trees and nice ambient music (note: ambient music optional if you’re easily pissed off by zen chimes).

Being a bare-bones basic bit of software, it’s not a substitute for the professional need for Word or other evils in your life, but it does create a calming oasis for your screen, one unburdened by the nagging sight of too many open windows and apps on your machine (case in point, there’s six other windows floating under the one I’m currently typing this post into, and that’s just on this particular screen view). Whether it will make me a calmer, happier writer is another matter entirely.

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