Writer’s block can happen at any time. It can last for any length of time. Sometimes this can become a real problem.

Many years ago I decided to start researching and writing a book on the history of the Amiga computer. My initial announcement, full of piss and vingegar, was on comp.sys.amiga.advocacy. “I am writing the history of the Amiga,” I proclaimed, boldly writing the first two pages on my iBook G3, and then I promptly got stuck.

A few years later, I had an idea. I contacted the owners of Ars Technica and asked if they were willing to publish the story on their site, in weekly (or monthly) instalments. Suddenly I had the momentum back. I published five articles dealing with the history of the early Amiga company, the buyout from Commodore, the splashy release of the Amiga 1000 in 1985, and the struggles the company had to deal with with shortly thereafter.

I was on a roll. I had all the sources I needed and the writing just flowed. I got up to the point where, according to my outline, I was going to leave the chronological tale for a while and delve into some stories from various aspects of the Amiga community. The first aspect? Gaming, an important part of the Amiga experience.

My momentum slowed. I finally got one article out after playing through a whole slew of popular Amiga games, but I needed more. What I really needed were some great stories from people who were there, developers and artists and managers who worked on Amiga games back in the 1980s and 1990s.

I had a plan! I would find the names of old Amiga game developers and contact them! It was so simple, it just might work! Between the Internet and old game boxes, I found plenty of names. That’s where the problem started. Matching names from the 1980s to current email addresses in 2009 is virtually impossible. Some of these people had gone on to be much more influential in the industry, and were now hidden behind corporate “Executive Staff” pages. Others had disappeared from the Internet entirely. Still others had names that were too common, so that email searches went to the wrong people.

So I got stuck again. For more than a year.

In the end, it was desperation that got me out. I had agreed to a mid-to-late December deadline for resuming my Amiga history articles on Ars Technica, and this time, I thought, I would really try, harder than I had ever tried before. Surely this would work! Of course it didn’t, but as the deadline loomed I had another idea.

What if I, instead of the next article, posted a short plea on Ars Technica itself, asking for anyone who was involve in the Amiga games industry to contact me? If it was promoted enough, the article could flow through the series of tubes comprising the Internet, and maybe people might see it and email me, instead of the other way around! I proposed this idea and the Ars staff accepted.

The next time I get stuck, I’m going to try to skip to the desperation stage much, much sooner. Maybe it will even work.