I know I've said it before, but there's nothing like a deadline.

Fake deadlines, real deadlines, as long as there's someone you're letting down if you don't make it, or as long as there's a definite end point beyond which you can't continue, it will work.

Par example, each day I know I have to get out of the library at a certain time. When the announcement comes over the loudspeaker saying that we need to get out because they're closing, I know there's half an hour left. I reckon my best work is thanks to that guy. If that guy could make threatening announcements all day, I'd be as prolific as Bryce Courtney. And possibly as unrelaxed.

Another very real deadline: the AC power on my laptop isn't working for some reason. I have forty minutes left before it goes to sleep.

So, you'll have to excuse me while I write a novel. A short one.

The problem with having a regime (which I currently do) that attempts in some way to emulate those infuriatingly prolific writers who get up early in the morning, run a couple of hundred ks, go to the market where they know everyone's first name, do the gardening, visit the infirm and then return to their desks by seven with a fresh page and clear mind... is that SOME THINGS CAN'T HAPPEN.

You can't:

- expect not to forget your keys when you are busy packing a pre-made lunch into your bag, putting the washing on, and saying thanks and farewell to the German man in your shower (fixing the tiles). (Fixing the tiles is not a euphemism).

- expect to be able to read or watch films or see your friends. Ever. Several of mine are not speaking to me, which is a shame but does cut down on the list of people I need to get back to about things.

- avoid far ranging and un-premediated fits of white hot fury in relation to very small things such as where something is and why it isn't where you thought it might be, drivers who don't indicate, or indeed anything at all for instance air. Today, I stopped riding my bicycle in the middle of the street in order to shout at a small particle of a leaf which had blown into my eye.

This had better be a good script I'm writing, I tell you what.

PS. And I bought Alan Bennett's new book and everything. And it looks lovely. And it feels lovely in your hands. And then you fall asleep and wake up at 7am with a German man in your loungeroom asking if he can take his tools upstairs. Take them anywhere you like, you say through your explosion of slept-on hair. You're not Alan Bennett, so why should I mind?

It's not going well.

Getting up in the morning like a normal person is not going well.

Yesterday, I arose at seven in the morning, had a coffee down the road, rode my bicycle into the city, lay in the sun while reading in preparation and waiting for the library to open, went into the library, and promptly failed to have an idea.

For an entire day.

Not one, solitary idea.

Or, not a good one, at least.

I worked hard, don't get me wrong, but to ABSOLUTELY NO AVAIL.

If I was my boss, I'd fire myself.

Hang on...

Today I am writing in the library again after another early morning start (in other words I arose at seven because there was a bloke coming to fix our shower). The early morning starts have been excellent for maximising the usefulness of my mornings, but have completely shattered my ability to function as a human being beyond lunch time.

I plod on, however, with weary eyes and a growing irritation at the world around me. I actually reprimanded a bloke in the library today (to be fair to me he was a total chump - speaking on the phone in the library at the top of your voice after receiving a call on a stupidly ring-toned phone is NOT okay just because you are hovering several metres away from the silent reading area. This is not how sound works. I am not a sound engineer but I have ascertained this fact through years of first hand research - and I happen to know that attempting to deny this fact makes you a giant chump).

On days like today, in order to wake myself up, I go outside to enjoy the sun on the lawn outside the library while I have a coffee or lunch. Outside this library, there is a proud bronze statue. For some time now, I have wondered about the spikes they put on the tops of statues these days in order to ward off the birds - have you seen them? - thin, mean little skewers designed to prevent birds from resting and covering the bronze head and shoulders of the anointed persona in the lurid white birdpoo-wigs all statues used to wear when I was a kid. Today, at lunch time, this suddenly appeared to me to be richly bizarre. To want a statue commemorating a long-gone hero, to desire to elevate him (or, if the statute is mythical, her) to a grand scale... even this desire seems pathetic. But do human beings then want to strip their favourite idol of all dignity by sticking spikes in his head, lest nature overpower us once again by crapping on what we consider to be life's significant leaders?

And how do the birds know not to go there? Have some of them been skewered and others of them heard about it? Or do they just see the spike and avoid the area? In some countries, statues secretly electrocute offending birds. Cleanest statues in the world, most fuzzy looking natural aviators. At least spikes give them a bit of a heads-up.

All in all, a lonely day spent with chumps and seagulls, but an educational one nonetheless. I've emerged with an anti-statue stance and I've come out (yet again) as being extremely anti-chump.

I have worked as a script editor before on a few things unofficially and a few things officially (including the upcoming ABC TV show The Librarians, which is running some very exciting looking promos at the moment by the way, and you should all watch it).

Being a script editor is so much fun because you can work objectively and then leave. You can see the problems, suggest possible new directions, scrap things you don't like, and then walk away from the rubble you have created while someone else does the work.

At least, that's how it felt from the perspective of BEING a script editor.

Now, for our children's TV script we're writing, we are working with our own script editor and I have realised something. A script editors is, quite simply, the best thing since sliced bread. Or indeed bread of any kind. The best thing since yeast.

You know that game where you have to say which permanent member of staff you would employ if you could - you know, most people say masseur or chef or butler or whatever?

Script editor. For sure. Not even a contest. Not even if the chef was Jamie Oliver and the masseur was Johnny Depp.

I'm sorry Johnny, that was a lovely audition, it really was, but you see I can only employ one staff member so I'm afraid you'll have to go. Do take one of Jamie's crab bisques on your way out won't you.

Poor Johnny. He never had a chance.

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.

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 go”, 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.