Racing against the clock

What a feeling! Writers dashing off several hundred words with their flying fingers in the white heat of the moment to produce instant reviews.

I HAD been sitting out the Arts Festival - until the other night when my editor stopped by my office just when I had my feet up on the table and was admiring my pair of Helmut Lang boots. But more about that in the other story below.

We decided this year to make our coverage of the festival more challenging for ourselves, and at the same time offer more value for our readers, by producing an overnight review page in the Home Section of The Straits Times daily, except on Mondays.

In previous years, because we carried our reviews in Life!, we could not do them overnight, since given the limited number of print windows of our presses in Jurong, the section has to be made up by 7 pm each day, while the main paper is ""put to bed'', as we in the trade put it, at midnight or often at 11 on Thursday and Friday nights.

Because a number of the festival shows are run over two or more evenings, we feel overnight reviews can serve as a useful guide for those readers who haven't bought tickets to some of the shows, and may decide to do so after they have read our reviewers.

There is also a sense of immediacy and, hopefully, excitement, which is what a newspaper is about anyway. 

The longer discursive pieces, which we believe are as necessary as the quick reviews, we run in Life! 

So I volunteered to sit out the festival and stay in the office every night to help my colleague, sub-editor Hayati, put together the page against a very tight deadline. 

My colleagues mainly Sor Fern, Clarissa and Shzr Ee, supervised by Ah Yoke - who are covering the events, file their reviews on their laptops immediately after the shows at the venues. They usually have about half an hour to finish their report and send it over to the office electronically. 

This is the first time they are doing so every night for a stretch of more than three weeks, and, despite their protest - ""But it's so stressful!'' they moan - I believe they are having fun, dashing off several hundred words with their flying fingers in the white heat of the moment, as the crowd pours out of the theatre. 

Cheryl Tsao, our sweet intern who does the exit poll, enjoyed it so much in the first week she did it, that even though she quit her internship by the second week, she volunteered to carry on doing the assignment till the end of the festival, for free. 

The times being what they are, we were actually tempted to take up her free offer. Thank goodness for the paper's reputation, good sense prevailed, and she gets paid a small fee and claims for her taxi fares. 

She buttonholes some people every night after a show, gets their views, and then snaps their pictures with a digital camera. She has an uncanny knack for picking out doctors, for our exit poll almost always features a doctor's eloquent quotes. 

And then there's the bit of buzz created by our columnist Ms Fest Pest. 

Several conspiracy theories have been floated regarding her identity. I'm keeping mum, but be rest assured that I'm as annoyed with her as you are. She's expecting an extended tenure, but I've got the Baygon ready, and trust me, she'll be terminated with extreme prejudice when the festival is over. 

I'm really the poor sod who should be complaining, holed up as I am in the office, missing out on all those gorgeous babes - okay, and hunks - in those many splendoured, many layered postmodern productions, which I can only drool over when my colleagues' exciting field reports come in. 

Hayati, who used to draw the Straits Times Page One and the prime news pages of the main paper when she was on the Home sub-editing team, is a boon to Life! The speed with which she puts together text and pictures on the computer screen has never ceased to amaze me.

Except on the first night, we've not missed a deadline, even on those scary Thursday and Friday nights when the ""offstone'' time is 11 pm.

She must be having fun. And really, so did I, until that fateful night my good editor stopped by my office...