Is it spring?

Feels like it's spring.

Spring is an inspirational time for me. For some reason, the air makes me bounce. People stroll through parks and eat lunch in the sun, dogs swivel midair towards frisbees, coffees stop reminding me of cigarettes and phlegm and start smelling clean and sharp with the promise of summer...

And then I get home and remember that boring things happen even when you feel like you should be able to follow the creative whim of a spring day.

1. My laptop has sustained considerable damage thanks to me not being able to invent a time machine and go back to just before the moment I dropped it.

2. Bills. Always bills.

3. Real estate crap. What do you MEAN I signed my name incorrectly on your stupid bond claim form? I have signed the EXACT SAME SIGNATURE ON EVERYTHING ELSE FOR MY ENTIRE LIFE AND NOBODY HAS EVER QUESTIONED IT, INCLUDING THE POLICE/ VISA PEOPLE/ US SECURITY ETC.

4. The thing I can't find is definitely here somewhere.

5. Should probably do something about that mess.

So look, spring is lovely and all that, but could my creative inspiration PLEASE slot itself into the relevant sections of my life (such as when I am staring at a blank page, desperately searching for an idea).

PS If it is not spring, please disregard this post.

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.

So after a week of reporting NO NEWS WHATSOEVER in this, the official Standing There Productions Diary, I hereby produce a trump card, the likes of which I don't come across too often.

Over the past week, we have received (a) good news and (b) bad news. Receiving any news whatsoever is usually a bit of a coup, but two things at once is extraordinary.

First, the good:

Last Wednesday, Standing There Productions was notified that our kid's TV proposal has received development funding from the Australian Children's Television Foundation, which anyone who grew up in Australia will know as "the little smiley face that comes up at the end of the Australian shows".

Development funding means "funding to write the idea into a script", so don't expect to see our name on the credits of anything in the immediate future, if ever. We're being helped to write a draft of a first episode - known in the biz as a "baby step". We're very excited about it, because we get to work with people who have done this before, including a real life grown-up script editor. It might also make the juggling act between paid work and creative sessions in the library a little easier to handle.

HOWEVER.

The bad news:

I dropped my laptop.

Dropped it. Spectacularly. I have been intending to go in and find out the extent of the damage at the mac place. I almost made it there yesterday but I can't quite face it. I feel like a neglectful mother who dropped her child on its head.

So. The good news is that we have support to write stuff. The bad news is we have nothing to write it on.

Also, if anyone watched Kath and Kim this last Sunday (the 9th), five points for anyone who noticed the Standing There Productions prop.

Anyone?

So I'm on a work trip in Northern Victoria, and my work day is over so I've got nothing to do.

Just like that. I've got nothing to do. Nothing. No expectations, either creative or social. This hasn't happened in years. The working day is done, the laptop is in my hotel room, there's takeaway pizza to be ordered and nobody in the whole town who knows my name, with the possible exception of the person on reception who asked me how I would like my eggs in the morning. (In a big pile).

So, in brief: I'm tired, I'm alone, I've had a big day at work.

I'm a NORMAL PERSON!!!!

Huzzah!

Being a normal person always makes me want to cheat.

I think, "Wow, this is how normal people live. I could just go back to the hotel and watch movies starring a young harrison ford... but I might make the most of it by TOTALLY GOING BACK TO MY HOTEL ROOM AND WRITING A NOVEL!"

Anyway needless to say, that trick almost never works. I found out one of The Most Cool Friends I Never See is in town. This town. The small town in which nobody knows my name except the eggs guy!

How good is life!

So, yeah, I "wasted" my normal night of potential creative genius. The novel will have to wait.

Plus, anyway, Harrison Ford is such a goofball.

Yesterday, I was struck? Became stricken? Was struckerated? Let me try that again: I have been struck down with a cold/flu/hideous head cold type of arrangement. About three years ago, I used to get sick all the time. Back in those days, being sick was depressing. It was oppressive and personal - largely because it was ongoing and I was supposed to be getting work done.

Nowadays, (providing I'm not too sick) it's kind of an enforced break. I'm the only person I disappoint (tonight I am missing the wonderful Shane Koyczan at the Malthouse) and I'm costing MYSELF money, rather than other people, so I don't feel quite so guilty or resentful, and I don't feel obliged to do... well... anything.

As a result, check out my achievements over the past two days:

1. Finished reading a novel that has been driving me completely insane (We Need To Talk About Kevin). I'm one of those people who watches a thriller where everyone is cruel and vile and it gets to the end and I say to the person sitting next to me, "So WHAT? What the hell am I supposed to do with that?" This is a little bit how I feel when I read a book about people who can't communicate and who end up being vile to each other for no reason with violent consequences. It was interesting that it was a woman writing about not liking her son who turned out to be involved in a school massacre but it seemed contrived to me, and deliberately directionless. Anyway. That's what I thought. So I finished it. And then I went outside.

2. Went for a walk to the park and lay about on the grass with the sun on my sick face.

3. Looked at everyone else in the park, lying on the grass, and wondered who they all were. Where did they come from? Are they all sick, too? Are they chucking sickies and they're not really sick? Are they internet people or shift workers or consultants? One of them, as I stumbled dumbly past, called the other one "a bit slack", so possibly the herald sun should get down there, pronto.

4. Started a book of short stories by Miranda July. Oh Miranda, you're so clever.

*Adds to list of literary crushes*

5. Dawdled on facebook. Check this out (thanks to Josh):

... makes me think I fall a little too heavily on the "got language and opposable thumbs" side and a little too scantily on the "got short term memory" side. What was I saying etc etc.

6. And half cleaned my bedroom. Some days when I'm WELL don't go as productively as these two. Yay for the flu. Now, bugger off please flu. I can't afford this.

So the thing about writing is that you have to believe you're good at it. You have to believe that your particular take on this particular topic is interesting to other people. You have to imagine your audience, which means you have to imagine you have an audience.

In the months since our last show with an actual audience (hurrah! they DO exist!) it has been back to the drawing board (or, to be more precise, the yellowing laptop) and the imagining of an audience there is no proof of.

Sometimes, I just want something concrete to do. Something I tick on a list. Something I can give myself an A for. Sometimes I wish I was good at maths. Correct, says the red pen. Ten out of ten. Or even four out of ten. Even a fail. A bit of an objective marker, against which words and ideas can be rated out of ten.

Sometimes... and I know there are some of you who will be narrowing their eyes at me sternly when I say this... sometimes I wish I worked in the corporate world and received performance reviews. At least that way I could resent the powers that be for misjudging my dedication or for accusing me of lackluster sales figures or something...

But I AM the powers that be. Which is a terrible indictment on the process, just quietly.

I wonder if writers are more often than not control freaks. I am. I'm a control freak in the rest of my life. I have to drive the car. I have to read the program in the foyer before I see a theatre show. I have to win the Nintendo Wii tennis game, or else I will force the person I am playing into rematch after rematch until we've all missed dinner and I'm sweating and panting and saying "Just this one more time".

Even in the activities that I love that have nothing to do with writing or with winning, I find lack of control the most frustrating impediment - as if the world is conspiring against my perfecting of the perfect frisbee throw, my telling of the entertaining story, or my cycling home into the perfect sunset without getting a red light and having to waddle on my bike over to the pedestrian button and press it lots of times in order to convince the red light that there are lots of people waiting to cross.

This is a sad psychological state of affairs. Even sadder when you think about the fact that, as a control freak, this is one system you cannot reform. Because if we DID rate writing out of ten, and if there WAS a way we could determine the value of writing on a sliding scale, then we would be doing what so many people (erhem) find objectionable about literary prizes and arts grants - we would be pretending that subjective judgement is objective, or that popularity is success, or that it isn't...

Anyway. Isn't the winter sun lovely?

Sitting in it and drinking a coffee the size of a bluetongue lizard. Now that's something I can give myself ten out of ten for.

PS Check out these news stories and tell me there isn't something richly bizarre about humankind: Slapstick Driver Hits The Gas and this, which is proof that comedians will do anything for a laugh. As if we needed more proof of that.

I read in the newspaper this morning that parents and teachers are concerned about broadband internet being available in classrooms because it might prove detrimental to learning.

You reckon?

Here are the top ten things that distract me from getting any writing done. Ever. In order:

1. The internet generally. So pregnant with possibilities. So educational. So easy to write off as "research" or "inspiration".

2. Email. Combined with The Guilt of not writing is The Secondary Guilt of not getting back to amusing friends you do not deserve in the first place on account of points 1 - 10.

3. Facebook. So boring, so uninspiring, and yet so constantly in need of being checked just in case someone has set their status to "____ is pregnant" or similar.

4. Text messages and social life - or, more recently, deterrence of social life. The preventing of a social life in order that I may proceed further as an antisocial writer locked in a hermitage, all of which is proved redundant on account of numbers 1 - 10.

5. Bills, rent, going shopping, getting haircuts (once a year if being particularly diligent) - all of which I do with a great deal of resentment because I am not writing. Which I don't do much anyway, as you can see from points 1 - 10.

6. Cleaning and organising things because deadlines are pending. EG cleaning computer keyboards with toothbrushes or organising books according to Dewey Decimal Classification system. (I'm just kidding, obviously. My books are alphabetised into sections. You borrow one and you may need to fill out a form.)

7. Writing here on this very site - see those extra long entries recently? I was supposed to be doing something on those days. I was supposed to be really cracking the back of my work on those days. Those days were days that had been carefully put aside for the creating of new and exciting Standing There Productions projects. Yup. Sure did have a lot to do on those days.

8. Youtube. Particularly Japanese gameshows. Also political speeches. See "research", above.

9. Doing paid work, getting excercise, doing anything really that can fit neatly on the "virtuous" side of the ledger rather than the "YOU ARE BETRAYING YOURSELF" side of the ledger.

10. Watching DVDs and films. See reference to "research", above.

So yes, look, if I were a student I'd be arguing for broadband in the classroom, but for crying out loud, they already watch The Simpsons on their iPods when they're supposed to be learning about fractions. For the sake of the children, ban the internet!

PS. Thanks to Paul and Rits for their favourite MIFF lists. We must have gone to three separate film festivals. Can't wait to see the general releases when they come out. I see in the paper today that MIFF met its budget, which it won't reveal. That must be nice for them! I SPENT MINE! God, next year, let's remember to PACK SANDWICHES, guys.