So. It begins.
I am officially working for Standing There Productions starting tomorrow. I went into work today, "real work" as I have been calling it for years, and told them I'd see them in December.
Yikes.
This had better be worth it.
Work
Ye Gads
Posted by lorin, October 8th, 2007 in
You're missing the best part of the day
Posted by lorin, October 7th, 2007 in
As a writer, and as a human being, I am not a morning person.
Mornings for me have always been eerie, sickly, befuddling continents, shifting at about 10am into a new geography involving the tender preparation and cautious, careful consumption of earl grey tea.
People who get up in the morning are often people I admire, people I aspire to be more like. My grandfather, ex army, several hundred years old, gets up at the crack of dawn and marches through fields and villages, cities and towns, other dimensional realms etc returning in time for two pieces of charcoal covered in honey, and tea. My routine inherited only the tea. It seems to me that if only I could manage the getting up early part of the routine, I might also live to be a hundred, marching through fields and villages and getting my photograph in the local newspaper for riding a Harley Davidson motorbike at the age of ninety-one (seriously, check this out).
Among my peers, too, I am surrounded. Rita Walsh, Standing There producer (also my boss) gets up half an hour after she goes to bed, runs the Melbourne marathon because she "might as well give it a goâ€, and never forgets anything, with the notable exception of how long she has paid for parking. When we worked together in an office, years ago, I would turn up to work, stumble through the day and marvel at Rita’s machine-like efficiency. She was like Industrial Era Europe - all shiny pistons and fast-moving conveyor belts. At about three in the afternoon, however, Rits would drop like a marionette and I would emerge, hero-like, from a thick fog, finally ready to conquer all the things Rita hadn’t already done. This usually meant it was my job to get Rita a coffee, put the phones on voicemail, and go home.
The problem is though, Rita has adapted. Like a sea creature growing legs and striding up the shore towards a future splitting the atom and having opposable thumbs and so forth, Rita now works until quite late at night. I, on the other hand, remain back in the dark ages.
So this morning, we began Operation Make Lorin More Productive on Monday Mornings. It’s not a name we’ve run past our marketing and communications manager yet, but you get the idea. I need to write to schedule now. That means not at midnight.
I was outside, vertical, walking to a meeting with Rita, at seven thirty this morning. Things actually happen at that time. The sun hits a different part of your face. Old ladies - the same ones who would put doilies out when a guest was coming - stand outside in their front gardens frowning as they hose the geraniums, squinting at you in their puffy high-fire-danger dressing gowns, hair already in curlers. When I got to the meeting, I had to excuse myself and squeeze past a seagull who was scooping the top off a puddle of morning water with its orange beak.
It’s only taken a day, but I’m already a morning person.
When I got to the State Library, I was proud to be among the library nerds I usually curse who stand out the front like people queuing for grand final tickets, waiting for the library to open so they can go in and achieve more by midday than the rest of us would achieve in a week.
Yeah, I’m one of those guys now. You just watch.
As a writer, and as a human being, I am not a morning person.
Mornings for me have always been eerie, sickly, befuddling continents, shifting at about 10am into a new geography involving the tender preparation and cautious, careful consumption of earl grey tea.
People who get up in the morning are often people I admire, people I aspire to be more like. My grandfather, ex army, several hundred years old, gets up at the crack of dawn and marches through fields and villages, cities and towns, other dimensional realms etc returning in time for two pieces of charcoal covered in honey, and tea. My routine inherited only the tea. It seems to me that if only I could manage the getting up early part of the routine, I might also live to be a hundred, marching through fields and villages and getting my photograph in the local newspaper for riding a Harley Davidson motorbike at the age of ninety-one (seriously, check this out).
Among my peers, too, I am surrounded. Rita Walsh, Standing There producer (also my boss) gets up half an hour after she goes to bed, runs the Melbourne marathon because she "might as well give it a goâ€, and never forgets anything, with the notable exception of how long she has paid for parking. When we worked together in an office, years ago, I would turn up to work, stumble through the day and marvel at Rita’s machine-like efficiency. She was like Industrial Era Europe - all shiny pistons and fast-moving conveyor belts. At about three in the afternoon, however, Rits would drop like a marionette and I would emerge, hero-like, from a thick fog, finally ready to conquer all the things Rita hadn’t already done. This usually meant it was my job to get Rita a coffee, put the phones on voicemail, and go home.
The problem is though, Rita has adapted. Like a sea creature growing legs and striding up the shore towards a future splitting the atom and having opposable thumbs and so forth, Rita now works until quite late at night. I, on the other hand, remain back in the dark ages.
So this morning, we began Operation Make Lorin More Productive on Monday Mornings. It’s not a name we’ve run past our marketing and communications manager yet, but you get the idea. I need to write to schedule now. That means not at midnight.
I was outside, vertical, walking to a meeting with Rita, at seven thirty this morning. Things actually happen at that time. The sun hits a different part of your face. Old ladies - the same ones who would put doilies out when a guest was coming - stand outside in their front gardens frowning as they hose the geraniums, squinting at you in their puffy high-fire-danger dressing gowns, hair already in curlers. When I got to the meeting, I had to excuse myself and squeeze past a seagull who was scooping the top off a puddle of morning water with its orange beak.
It’s only taken a day, but I’m already a morning person.
When I got to the State Library, I was proud to be among the library nerds I usually curse who stand out the front like people queuing for grand final tickets, waiting for the library to open so they can go in and achieve more by midday than the rest of us would achieve in a week.
Yeah, I’m one of those guys now. You just watch.
Trust Us
Posted by lorin, October 4th, 2007 in
I have always thought it would be nice to be an "artist in residence", if only because it might make me feel slightly more legitimate in applying for my Melbourne Festival Artist Pass, but also because it sounds romantic.
Which is why it is particularly delightful that Standing There Productions has been granted a residency at Australian artists Arthur and Yvonne Boyd's property, Bundanon (which you can see here) in New South Wales, for a month yet to be determined in 2008.
We're pretty excited about having, as Virginia Woolf would say, a room of our own. Bundanon has provided inspiration for many Australian artists since the Boyds, who believed that "nobody should own a landscape" and therefore donated their property to Australian artists for the rest of time.
How cool is that? Pretty cool cats, dem Boyds, as it turns out.
Although... living for a month in a peaceful and inspiring landscape will be a challenge. Suddenly I'll be having nobody to blame but myself, and possibly Rita and Stew.
Which is fine. They totally had it coming.
PS. Proof that one woman's heaven is another's hell: I told my housemate about the residency and she said, patiently, wanting to understand, "So, it's kind of like... jail?"
Hm. Kind of. In a good way. A jail with a view.
I have always thought it would be nice to be an "artist in residence", if only because it might make me feel slightly more legitimate in applying for my Melbourne Festival Artist Pass, but also because it sounds romantic.
Which is why it is particularly delightful that Standing There Productions has been granted a residency at Australian artists Arthur and Yvonne Boyd's property, Bundanon (which you can see here) in New South Wales, for a month yet to be determined in 2008.
We're pretty excited about having, as Virginia Woolf would say, a room of our own. Bundanon has provided inspiration for many Australian artists since the Boyds, who believed that "nobody should own a landscape" and therefore donated their property to Australian artists for the rest of time.
How cool is that? Pretty cool cats, dem Boyds, as it turns out.
Although... living for a month in a peaceful and inspiring landscape will be a challenge. Suddenly I'll be having nobody to blame but myself, and possibly Rita and Stew.
Which is fine. They totally had it coming.
PS. Proof that one woman's heaven is another's hell: I told my housemate about the residency and she said, patiently, wanting to understand, "So, it's kind of like... jail?"
Hm. Kind of. In a good way. A jail with a view.
Antibiotic
Posted by lorin, October 1st, 2007 in
I am on antibiotics. I don't really understand antibiotics. That is to say, when someone explains it to me, I kind of follow what they're saying, but it's like when people explain aeroplanes and underwater tunnels - it just leaves me thinking, "Well I suppose that makes sense, since clearly there are aeroplanes in the sky and tunnels underwater, but..."
Let's just say I wouldn't be surprised if (like the Y2K bug) it all turned out to be rubbish.
Not that I'm dissing it. Not really. I just think of these things as 'magic'. Hopefully, magic that will be complete by Thursday. Deadlines wait for nobody.
I am on antibiotics. I don't really understand antibiotics. That is to say, when someone explains it to me, I kind of follow what they're saying, but it's like when people explain aeroplanes and underwater tunnels - it just leaves me thinking, "Well I suppose that makes sense, since clearly there are aeroplanes in the sky and tunnels underwater, but..."
Let's just say I wouldn't be surprised if (like the Y2K bug) it all turned out to be rubbish.
Not that I'm dissing it. Not really. I just think of these things as 'magic'. Hopefully, magic that will be complete by Thursday. Deadlines wait for nobody.
Five Most Boring Topics On Earth
Posted by lorin, September 30th, 2007 in
Today, I am feeling poorly.
I have, karma-style, brought this on myself by pointing and laughing at my beloved, who contracted an illness called "croup", usually only contracted by babies. Although it is true that he is a lot younger than I am, he is not THAT much younger than I am, so I was finding it amusing that he had a sickness reserved, appropriately, for infants. Was he also suffering nappy rash? Did he want his dummy? etc. Hilarious.
Then, I started sneezing and coughing, wanting to tear out my burning tonsils, attempting to throw off a rampant fever, and desiring simply to lie down until the winds of time swept me into another dimension. Not so hilarious, as it turns out. More hideous, really, than hilarious, when you think about it. Still, there is some conjecture over whether or not I have the same illness as my manfriend (let's call him Babyface) which thus renders croup hilarious again, since hilarity is, as we all know from Australia's Funniest Home Videos, in the eye of the beholder.
If anyone out there has ever tried to write while suffering from a fever, you will know that it is quite a bizarre state to create anything in (apart from, frankly, mucus). I often try to write or plan creative projects when I'm lying in bed with a fever because, not being a drug taker, I rarely get the opportunity to read over my own writing later and think, "What the hell was I thinking? Who wrote this? I don't remember writing this. I don't remember anything! You guys! Are you having me on?" etc. It really is quite loopy what goes through your fevered mind.
Now I want to read this book, but the problem with being sick is that as soon as you're not sick any more, it's the most boring topic on earth.
In fact, clinical tests prove that the five most boring things on earth to discuss are:
Illness (unless it's fantastic like the girl whose spider bite turned out to be a nest of baby spiders on her face)
Other people's dreams (fascinating to you, boring to everyone else)
Stories about pets (I refer here to stories that do not have plots - the mere fact that an animal is in the story somehow meaning that the story can be about how an animal exists, wags its tail, has fussy eating habits, sleeps, has a name etc. Animal stories are only interesting if your animal has saved somebody's life, played an instrument, been involved in a crime of some sort, or (like the lizard in the newspaper recently) eaten a toy version of itself and then excreted it, causing its child owner to exclaim that it is having a baby out of its bottom).
Office procedures (Apparently, discussions relating to the most appropriate method of filing or archiving are always long, no matter who you work for, and they usually involve two very opinionated polar opposite positions, about neither of which anybody else cares).
and
Traffic (As much as it might pain you at the time, someone overtaking you from the inside lane will bore the pants off someone at the barbecue you arrive late at. Unless you actually have an accident, become involved in fisticuffs, or accidentally flick the bird at mother theresa, it's boring. It just is.)
Do you know how I know this? Because I worked on the phones at a radio station. Do you know the top two topics people want to talk about on talkback radio? Traffic, and pets. Dreams comes in at number three, closely followed by children, sob stories (illness comes in here, so does debt) and weather. The only one of these that doesn't make it onto talkback radio is office procedures.
Maybe I should start my own show.
Today, I am feeling poorly.
I have, karma-style, brought this on myself by pointing and laughing at my beloved, who contracted an illness called "croup", usually only contracted by babies. Although it is true that he is a lot younger than I am, he is not THAT much younger than I am, so I was finding it amusing that he had a sickness reserved, appropriately, for infants. Was he also suffering nappy rash? Did he want his dummy? etc. Hilarious.
Then, I started sneezing and coughing, wanting to tear out my burning tonsils, attempting to throw off a rampant fever, and desiring simply to lie down until the winds of time swept me into another dimension. Not so hilarious, as it turns out. More hideous, really, than hilarious, when you think about it. Still, there is some conjecture over whether or not I have the same illness as my manfriend (let's call him Babyface) which thus renders croup hilarious again, since hilarity is, as we all know from Australia's Funniest Home Videos, in the eye of the beholder.
If anyone out there has ever tried to write while suffering from a fever, you will know that it is quite a bizarre state to create anything in (apart from, frankly, mucus). I often try to write or plan creative projects when I'm lying in bed with a fever because, not being a drug taker, I rarely get the opportunity to read over my own writing later and think, "What the hell was I thinking? Who wrote this? I don't remember writing this. I don't remember anything! You guys! Are you having me on?" etc. It really is quite loopy what goes through your fevered mind.
Now I want to read this book, but the problem with being sick is that as soon as you're not sick any more, it's the most boring topic on earth.
In fact, clinical tests prove that the five most boring things on earth to discuss are:
Illness (unless it's fantastic like the girl whose spider bite turned out to be a nest of baby spiders on her face)
Other people's dreams (fascinating to you, boring to everyone else)
Stories about pets (I refer here to stories that do not have plots - the mere fact that an animal is in the story somehow meaning that the story can be about how an animal exists, wags its tail, has fussy eating habits, sleeps, has a name etc. Animal stories are only interesting if your animal has saved somebody's life, played an instrument, been involved in a crime of some sort, or (like the lizard in the newspaper recently) eaten a toy version of itself and then excreted it, causing its child owner to exclaim that it is having a baby out of its bottom).
Office procedures (Apparently, discussions relating to the most appropriate method of filing or archiving are always long, no matter who you work for, and they usually involve two very opinionated polar opposite positions, about neither of which anybody else cares).
and
Traffic (As much as it might pain you at the time, someone overtaking you from the inside lane will bore the pants off someone at the barbecue you arrive late at. Unless you actually have an accident, become involved in fisticuffs, or accidentally flick the bird at mother theresa, it's boring. It just is.)
Do you know how I know this? Because I worked on the phones at a radio station. Do you know the top two topics people want to talk about on talkback radio? Traffic, and pets. Dreams comes in at number three, closely followed by children, sob stories (illness comes in here, so does debt) and weather. The only one of these that doesn't make it onto talkback radio is office procedures.
Maybe I should start my own show.
Mondays
Posted by lorin, September 16th, 2007 in
I know it's Garfield's line, but I hate Mondays.
It doesn't matter how organised, restful or enjoyable my weekend was. It also doesn't matter if I had a dreadful weekend and I'm looking forward to starting afresh. I could have all the best intentions in the world: I will still be ninety percent less efficient on a Monday.
By about midday, usually I have successfully managed to have a cup of coffee and sometimes I can claim to have "researched" headlines like "drunken mooning goes horribly wrong", but there are only so many "idiot sets fire to house after lighting fart" stories that can genuinely provide inspiration for creative projects.
Hopefully, things like that will make it into a play or film at some point, but it does seem kind of unlikely to make it into a children's TV series, which is what I'm supposed to be working on at the moment.
Perhaps I need to watch kids' TV all day on Monday. It might be more productive, and it will probably help with my somewhat remedial mathematics skills.
But, to be fair to myself, I do get more admin done on a Monday. If it weren't for Mondays I would probably never get back to anyone, never hand in anything on time, and never pay any bills.
Sometimes I think about writers like Bryce Courtney, who gets up half an hour before he goes to bed and splits the atom before breakfast and so on. My favourite all time literary couple, Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, don't have the internet at home.
I'm sure there is something deeply suspect about all these people - possibly they are the kind of people who animals instinctively mistrust - but I am yet to see any proof of it.
This gives me hope and simultaneously robs me of geniune satisfaction. Which is only because it's a Monday and I hate Mondays/enjoy lasagne/have a love-hate relationship with the man who feeds me etc. Garfield is such a grump.
I know it's Garfield's line, but I hate Mondays.
It doesn't matter how organised, restful or enjoyable my weekend was. It also doesn't matter if I had a dreadful weekend and I'm looking forward to starting afresh. I could have all the best intentions in the world: I will still be ninety percent less efficient on a Monday.
By about midday, usually I have successfully managed to have a cup of coffee and sometimes I can claim to have "researched" headlines like "drunken mooning goes horribly wrong", but there are only so many "idiot sets fire to house after lighting fart" stories that can genuinely provide inspiration for creative projects.
Hopefully, things like that will make it into a play or film at some point, but it does seem kind of unlikely to make it into a children's TV series, which is what I'm supposed to be working on at the moment.
Perhaps I need to watch kids' TV all day on Monday. It might be more productive, and it will probably help with my somewhat remedial mathematics skills.
But, to be fair to myself, I do get more admin done on a Monday. If it weren't for Mondays I would probably never get back to anyone, never hand in anything on time, and never pay any bills.
Sometimes I think about writers like Bryce Courtney, who gets up half an hour before he goes to bed and splits the atom before breakfast and so on. My favourite all time literary couple, Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, don't have the internet at home.
I'm sure there is something deeply suspect about all these people - possibly they are the kind of people who animals instinctively mistrust - but I am yet to see any proof of it.
This gives me hope and simultaneously robs me of geniune satisfaction. Which is only because it's a Monday and I hate Mondays/enjoy lasagne/have a love-hate relationship with the man who feeds me etc. Garfield is such a grump.
Transformations
Posted by lorin, September 12th, 2007 in
I have discussed here many times the perils of describing what it is you do when you're "freelance" and you juggle a few different jobs.
This week, things got a little more transparent for me: I became a proper writer (ie I am on the books somewhere other than the tax department) and, rather surprisingly for those of us who are me, I also became a lawyer.
Apparently, although I had no idea, I have in fact been a lawyer for some time. Apparently, according to my very knowledgeable dinner party host last night (who also cooks a mean roast and forcefeeds her guests chocolate) I have been a lawyer since I graduated from, well, my law degree. You see, technically speaking, according to the Legal Profession Act, "lawyer" means not that you practice law, or that you are trained to be a lawyer, but that you have a law degree. So here I was, laughing at lawyer jokes and insisting that even though I studied law I'm not a lawyer, and I HAVE BEEN A LAWYER ALL ALONG.
As you can imagine, this is quite a shock to the system.
Firstly, it means, according to my reckoning, that I am owed at least nine (possibly ten or eleven) trillion dollars. Think of all the lost revenue! Not ONCE have I charged myself out at $4K just to write a letter. Not once have I sent someone a bill after speaking with them on the telephone for half an hour. I have NEVER been flown to Sydney for a four day drinking binge as part of a "team building excercise", and I have until now never felt qualified to use sentences consisting mostly of acronyms.
Oh, shoosh. I can see all my lawyer friends frowning at me through the internet. As the homophobes say, some of my best friends are... etc.
Although this new professional tag does significant damage to my bohemian identity (I'm a fairly Cool Cat, I don't know if you've heard) it also causes a bit of an internal crisis. When I go to the theatre, should I sit in my black skivvy with my legs crossed peering over my glasses and tick ticking that the "London version was so much better" before having a crafty ciggie in the back lane and glugging the free wine and stealing toilet paper at interval? Or should I turn up in a suit, laugh loudly at the linguistic puns and then fall asleep because I've had three hours sleep since last Thursday?
Next I'll discover I'm a qualified vet on account of once having owned a goldfish.
Seems about as sensible.
And to the thousands of people who guessed the answer to yesterday's post, yes, the For We Are Young And Free flyer was in Kath and Kim on Sunday night. Very exciting claim to fame.
I have discussed here many times the perils of describing what it is you do when you're "freelance" and you juggle a few different jobs.
This week, things got a little more transparent for me: I became a proper writer (ie I am on the books somewhere other than the tax department) and, rather surprisingly for those of us who are me, I also became a lawyer.
Apparently, although I had no idea, I have in fact been a lawyer for some time. Apparently, according to my very knowledgeable dinner party host last night (who also cooks a mean roast and forcefeeds her guests chocolate) I have been a lawyer since I graduated from, well, my law degree. You see, technically speaking, according to the Legal Profession Act, "lawyer" means not that you practice law, or that you are trained to be a lawyer, but that you have a law degree. So here I was, laughing at lawyer jokes and insisting that even though I studied law I'm not a lawyer, and I HAVE BEEN A LAWYER ALL ALONG.
As you can imagine, this is quite a shock to the system.
Firstly, it means, according to my reckoning, that I am owed at least nine (possibly ten or eleven) trillion dollars. Think of all the lost revenue! Not ONCE have I charged myself out at $4K just to write a letter. Not once have I sent someone a bill after speaking with them on the telephone for half an hour. I have NEVER been flown to Sydney for a four day drinking binge as part of a "team building excercise", and I have until now never felt qualified to use sentences consisting mostly of acronyms.
Oh, shoosh. I can see all my lawyer friends frowning at me through the internet. As the homophobes say, some of my best friends are... etc.
Although this new professional tag does significant damage to my bohemian identity (I'm a fairly Cool Cat, I don't know if you've heard) it also causes a bit of an internal crisis. When I go to the theatre, should I sit in my black skivvy with my legs crossed peering over my glasses and tick ticking that the "London version was so much better" before having a crafty ciggie in the back lane and glugging the free wine and stealing toilet paper at interval? Or should I turn up in a suit, laugh loudly at the linguistic puns and then fall asleep because I've had three hours sleep since last Thursday?
Next I'll discover I'm a qualified vet on account of once having owned a goldfish.
Seems about as sensible.
And to the thousands of people who guessed the answer to yesterday's post, yes, the For We Are Young And Free flyer was in Kath and Kim on Sunday night. Very exciting claim to fame.