I hate to repeat myself but you WOULDN'T BELIEVE how many deadlines I've got.

Cop this:

- Organising a VIP breakfast for 400 people in the street on Wednesday next week. The caterers dropped out today.

- Writing a comedy festival script, auditions coming up very shortly

- Writing a script due on 31 Jan

- Writing a prose thing I was supposed to do "in January" which I am hoping meant "in February", and by February I am hoping they meant, kind of, March.

I promise I'll write something here that isn't about how I have no time and no money and too much to do. One day, I will write about sky and frisbees and swims and people riding bikes with bottles of wine and breadsticks in their handbaskets again.

Just not now.

I'm going on a writing holiday. Back Friday. If I don't do any writing on my writing holiday, you may not hear from me until March.

Just by way of warning.

Otherwise, see you Friday!

L

Thank you to the very astute and highly amused Big Oceans for pointing out the new heights to which Melbourne pretendy newspaper The Age rose majestically yesterday.

As you know, I am not very good at photoshop so I did not make this up. I couldn’t make this up. I would think this was a very laborious way of making the point that The Age is crappy, if it were not for the fact that The Age really is this crappy.

Britney Gets Flat Tyre

You heard it here first.

My favourite bit is how they try to make it news by mentioning other incidents involving Britney that have been in the news “She won’t be running over anyone’s foot in her car BECAUSE SHE HAS A FLAT TYRE!” and “her kids are gone so she’s feeling even worse now that she’s GOT A FLAT TYRE!”

I’m surprised they aren’t trying harder to make it newsworthy actually. “Third world debt is ballooning out of control, which Britney must have been contemplating WHEN SHE GOT A FLAT TYRE!”

“Hillary Clinton won the New Hampshire primary with no help from Britney who HAD A FLAT TYRE!”

In other news, it’s very hot today. It’s going to be 42 degrees in Mildura. Some people think this is because of global warming. Obviously they are failing to account for BRITNEY’S FLAT TYRE.

Did you know there are writers in Melbourne without work? Quelle hilair!

So, as George Bush convinces his coalition of the willing to gear up against Iran, the globe heats up, Kenya descends from democracy into chaos, the most powerful nation in the world launches a political campaign that could effect us all, spare a thought for the real news items that some fearless journalist somewhere is covering without concern for his or her own safety. Maybe Paris is getting out of a car. Maybe Enrique is scratching his botty. These journalists are the reason we fight for our freedom. Spare a thought for them.

When you picture someone writing, what do you picture?

A piece of paper and a pen, or a computer?

I used to picture the pen. I used to write with the pen. I used to write first, type later. Couldn’t do it any other way. These days, though, it’s straight into a blank word document, or I lose concentration and look out the window at the car being towed away opposite the cafe I go to. (At exactly 4pm every weekday, two parking ticket inspectors and a tow truck arrive at what was - at 3:59 - a car park but is now a clearway zone opposite the cafe. Parking ticket first; tow truck second; confused, disbelieving, furious motorist third. It’s a depressing regularity and the kind of thing one is likely to get an arts grant for filming in fast forward through a grainy camera with no sound and subtitles).

Sadly, my vision of a writer has clouded somewhat since I’ve attempted to be one. I don’t write things down, I don’t use a typewriter. I use a laptop, but not in the way I’d like to. I’m not like the writers in those pictures in American magazines that advertise the latest laptop: thoughtful, faintly amused writers in spectacles who wear white socks, resting on the laps of their clearly wealthy but inspiringly mixed-race families, while the fire burns away in the corner and the laptop is synched to the Blackberry which is synched to the office, where they have a job that requires them to write from home wearing white socks but also apparently keeps them in the life to which (just look at their kids) they have clearly become accustomed.

I never quite live up to the best parts of the corny picture people have of things. I live up to the worst: procrastinating on the internet, being antisocial, not having enough money to give anything the attention it deserves, and, you know, never going outside.

One day though, gadget. One day.

Well, at least the socks.

My study habits, such as they are, were established over a decade ago in year twelve, altered slightly at university to incorporate a cafe that served beer and nachos and contained like-minded procastinators and a pool table, and honed in recent years on account of the age-old adage of self-employment (taught to me originally by my year ten maths teacher) that "the only person you're letting down is yourself".

The two things I now require in order to write are:

1. No distractions.

2. Inspiration to work.

The former is a source of constant frustration on account of my zero tolerance policy for libraries not being (as yet) universal law. Sure, it may be difficult to police a zero tolerance gaffa-tape-over-the-mouth policy across the board without running into trouble with civil libertarians and so forth but SURELY IT IS WORTH IT SO SOMEONE... ANYONE... CAN GET SOME WORK DONE.

Anyway, at the moment, I have to trick myself.

The library has internet. I have to make myself go outside to the cafe and have a cup of tea while I write things without the internet. Never has so much work been done as when I'm having a "break" from my work.

Looks like the internet might be the next thing to go. Right after the beers and the nachos.

Do you ever get disappointed when you find out a word doesn't mean what you hoped it might?

I have a major in English and I thought sartorial had something to do with being witty.

Sartorial: pertaining to a tailor.

Pertaining to a frigging TAILOR?

That is so very disappointing. Not only does it not connote witty or sage comments, which please me, but sartorial turns out to be about FASHION, which displeases me enormously as anybody who has seen me in my "special pants" can attest.

What's more, I thought one could wear a "sartorial expression". One cannot! Not unless it's made of tweed or features a beaded flourish along the seam.

People who are word nerds, like myself, do not often admit ignorance pertaining to words pertaining to anything, least of all a tailor, and so it is that I declare an amnesty on misunderstood words. From now on, I shall declare my ignorance in such matters, as I do in most other matters, on these pages.

Sartorial. It just sounds witty.

By way of explaining my much lamented departure from these pages (thanks for all the mail. My secretary will endeavour to address each of you individually) here are some dot points:

1. It's official: we are putting together a show for the 2008 Melbourne International Comedy Festival. The show is called Greatness Thrust Upon Them and it will be performed in the utterly gorgeous Trades Hall precinct, in the Old Council Chambers. Every time I go to the Old Council Chambers I feel the history of the room creaking all around me. Our show is about history. Arguably all shows are about history, apart from a show I saw in second year university in a carpark, which appeared to be about a woman living on a futuristic planet with a bad case of hives and nothing but a feather boa and an eggbeater with which to pass away the hours. And they were long hours. But I digress.

2. I've been locked away writing our kids' TV episode draft with our script editor, Doug McLeod. It has been a priceless experience and I now have separation anxiety and no idea how I'm going to ever write anything including a shopping list or a birthday card without Doug's help ever again. *Hyperventillates into a paper bag*.

3. Obviously the script for our comedy festival show is some way off completion but we had to submit our image and our show description for the comedy festival guide this week. Submitting an image when you don't have a cast, and a summary of a show you haven't finished writing is an interesting exercise in issue-avoidance. Saying nothing while purporting to say something extremely interesting is a fine art reserved in normal circumstances for print journalism and teenagers.

4. Look, I have skills too. I can do stuff. Just because everyone else knows how to use photoshop to the maximum degree of hilarity doesn't mean I don't throw a mean frisbee or make an excellent cup of tea. Just because everyone else spends their spare time replacing Britney's head with Graham's from the accounts department doesn't mean I've been wasting my time. Just because it took me an entire day of googling things like "rasterise" and calling Stew in Thailand to find out what a dpi was and how come 100mm kept reverting to 98.2mm before I could do a simple thing like colour in the tie on a famous photo DOES NOT MEAN I AM A STUPID PERSON. It does, however, mean that Stew was boarding a boat in Thailand while saying "go to the dropdown menu". It also means that our image was handed in just in the nick of time.

5. I spent two days last week in Warrnambool with my law-talking-job, including a particularly enjoyable evening in my hotel room drinking vile cups of tea with UHT millk and putting the finishing touches on the episode draft until midnight. Still, it was an interesting trip. The Law Foundation is running an educational and community programme in rural areas (hence my previous trip to Mildura) so it's interesting work and I wouldn't mind living by the sea, if it somehow was made compulsory.

So those are my dot points to excuse my absence. Not really much point making them dot points if the only reason they are dot points is because they are preceded by numbers, but shoosh, I tried. I am writing this from my office (the library) and I am flanked on one side by a ball of phlegm surrounded by a sniffing human being and on the other side by a quite crazy lady singing and laughing and occasionally talking in tongues.

It is nice to be home.