A version of the following originally appeared in The Big Issue, which is an excellent magazine that you should go out and buy immediately for a range of reasons only some of which are to do with the fact that I am in the upcoming edition as well.

At my work we have a weekly tradition: Friday morning tea. Coffee, cake and the quiz from the newspaper. It's a great tradition. Except for the bit with the quiz. And sometimes the coffee. And one time the cake. But that's another story.

I have two problems with group quizzes. Firstly, they tend to involve a fair bit of “Hang on! I know this!” followed by the revelation of the actual answer, followed by cries of, “Iceland! Of course! I was just about to say Iceland”. Hence a friendly morning tea degenerates into a fight-to-the-death battle of wills with Lleyton-style appeals to third parties and heartfelt cries of “Come ON!”

Also, clinical tests prove that quizzes melt my brain. I either sit mute and stupid in the corner, or find myself shouting “Iceland! I knew it!” with my colleagues. I feel like I should be good at quizzes. I should know things. “Do not go gentle into that good night” was written by one of my heroes. I just can't think who, although I'm fairly sure it's not Rufus Wainwright or a Marx brother.

Well, it turns out (and I know this because I googled it) I can blame technology. According to Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, people who grew up using the internet don't prioritise remembering facts and don't respond to rote learning. A recent British study (googled it) found that tertiary educators are scrambling to adapt so they can teach students native to Google and Twitter and whose appreciation of, say, a Milton poem will come not from memorising the poem but from various sources including that Nick Cave song and maybe a hipster T-shirt with a Milton quote on it.

Who understands the poem better? Who knows? One university has made its position fairly clear by banning research using the internet entirely, favouring the learning of authoritative facts rather than a mess of information provided by faceless individuals with unknown agendas.

But in defence of internet natives: we do know how to use the internet. Generally speaking, we know what information to distrust. Most of it, usually. We're not the people emailing our account details to fake banks. We're not the ones giving money to the nice Nigerian man who needs help with his sick child. We don't trust every piece of information and we sure as hell don't remember it for next time because, by then, it might have changed.

So this is why I do not recall a single useful thread of information while doing a quiz. I'm not dumb, my brain is just more modern than yours. I'm totally getting a T shirt.

Sometimes, when it comes to writing deadlines, time disappears. Half an hour, two days, a month. This last time, I had a deadline during which one of my oldest friends gave birth to an actual human being. That really does tend to put things into perspective. 

Anyway.

Thing is, when you write a big bunch of stuff every day and your entire brain is consumed with this one, lonely idea you're working on, you know what? You don't write much else. You don't have much else to say. You don't, for instance, write an awful lot on your website. Or, you know, anything at all. But the two deadlines I've been working towards have now come to their crushing, painful conclusions and here I am, faced anew with fresh deadlines and a sense of hope. THIS TIME I'm going to be organised, clever, hilarious and the queen of the multitask.

I'll let you know how that goes for me.

Meanwhile, check out the next issue of the Big Issue. There's a slight possibility I am right up the back of it. Where all the cool kids hang out.

I do love the concept of a writer flourishing with merely a modest wage and a Room of Her Own. It's a lovely idea, and it's true, of course. 

However, I believe it could be more true.

5 Proposed Requirements to be added to the List of Things Writers Need In Order To Write Without Hinderance:

1. Interesting stationery. Whether it's a pen, a new computer program, a spunky little notebook, or even a pencil sharpener that renders a pencil more pleasing to use: as a writer, I am much more productive when I am interested in the media/process. If this implies that I am not interested, while writing, in the outcome, and that in fact the outcome (my own writing) bores me almost beyond comprehension, then I can only apologise for this appalling misrepresentation.

2. Copious amounts of food. Again, the more novelty value the food has ("Ooooh! Cheese wheels with pictures of cartoon animals on them that are obviously designed for children's lunchboxes!") the more one can be convinced that a cheese-wheel is as good as a holiday and one doesn't need to go outside and rediscover the real world. 

3. A butler. Preferably one who doesn't think "I know! I'll make a cup of tea!" and then promptly forget this original intention and emerge, two hours later, having de-iced the freezer with a butter knife and cleaned the floor with the aid of a toothbrush.

4. Access to all media - internet, television, radio, books - but only (and perhaps this is a bit Harry Potter, but surely someone can have it arranged) after a series of tests verifying a real and urgent need to be informed, as opposed to a perceived real and urgent need, these things not necessarily being distinguishable during the process of writing.

5. A trampoline. I am of the opinion that brief periods of trampolining during one's writing day would solve many of the problems associated with sitting still in the one place, thinking about the one thing, and going completely mental due to lack of stimulus.

The sooner these proposals are introduced into some kind of legislation, the better for the state of the nation.

Life has dramatic timing. Don't you think? It's tragic and vile and wonderful and funny and bland and confusing and then every now and then it raises its eyebrow at you and reminds you who's in charge.

I've had a few writing deadlines lately. One of them is this week. Usually, at about this point, my entire hard drive packs it in. That's happened two or three times now. Life, leaning back in its chair, shrugs sagely at me, as if to say, "Come on. I had to. You didn't back up your work! I mean, sure, you did, but that was before you wrote those extra specially good bits, in which you were so engrossed that you forgot to back them up, right? I mean, that's gorgeously dramatic. That's the perfect moment. It's almost ironic. I'd be letting down the team if I didn't swoop in and take advantage of your vulnerability there. You understand, right? You'd do the same."

And so I would. If I were Life, I'd do the same. Nobody likes a boring film where nothing happens to the main characters and nobody learns any lessons. If someone in a fim wrote something and got it in by the deadline without incident, or at the very least a montage of their lonely industry, staying up late and throwing scrunched-up paper towards (but never into) a waste paper basket, then who would care?
 

This week was a tiny blip on the grid, drama-wise. This isn't a main character dying, or a marriage being rent in twain due to the interference of a foxy Special Guest with ties to somebody's dark past. This is more like the level of drama that happens in a Seinfeld episode. But it has raised, for me, once again, the superiority of Life as an auteur with a fine command over genre.

On Monday, I became afflicted with the sore-throaty-sleepy-cough-coughy type of illness that doctors cheerily diagnose as "a virus" before telling you to get some lozenges and be on your way. I have subsequently spent the previous three days wondering things like "What's a sneeze FOR anyway?" and "Tonsils, eh? What are they playing at?" just as Life, I suspect, intended. And well within the Seinfeld trope.

The times when Life has been more dramatic, or less dramatic and more humorous, I have been less introspective about this "Life as artist" idea and more, you know, furious. This time, though, I have merely sat back and contemplated the beauty of a genius in action. And I've also googled "What are tonsils for?" Deliciously, they are described (here) as "infection fighting balls", or, to be more structured about it, the police force employed by the throat.

So Life has taught me something this week, for which I applaud it, although I do not appreciate the fact that the next few days are going to involve a lot of paper-scrunching.

So I guess I should admit now what I should have admitted in my previous post, which was written A BILLION YEARS AGO and is now of interest to anthropologists on account of what it suggests about ancient civilisations/use of language/eating habits etc.

I admit this: I am too busy at the moment. I am so busy that one of my closest friends ever in the world is having a baby in, like, half an hour, and I have seen her maybe twice since she found out she was pregnant. Being one of my closest friends ever in the world, she has not cut me off, been snitchy, or set fire to a paperbag with poo in it and posted it through my front door. She has in fact been entirely lovely and has introduced the provision of excellent cupcakes into the relationship as an added bonus.

But I have to be careful. I have to try not to say yes to things I might not be able to make. This weekend, Stew and I booked a flight to Sydney on the same day of the actual flight and rearranged our weekends at the last minute just so we could get a few meetings with Rita etc out of the way and get back to Melbourne today. It was all entirely worth doing and I have no idea how we would have done without it, but I had to cancel lunch with a friend I haven't seen for months, whose company I enjoy a great deal.

So I have become much better at managing my own expectations of myself, and the expectations others have of me. Today though, it all fell away. I was supposed to meet someone. I got the time wrong. She called after waiting for me, on the other side of town, for 20 minutes. I was about to leave the house. I just got it wrong. I wrote down the original time, not the altered time. I thought I might die of shame.

Writing is so hard to manage. It's solitary, it depends on you being in the right mood, in the right environment. It needs to be finished on time, but it also needs to be good. So you divide your other time around it, and that "other" time becomes like a whole other continent, foreign and distant and sometimes a bit scary or threatening. You can become, to extend the metaphor, a teensy bit racist. You resent the other time, you become afraid of it and over-sensitive and thin-skinned.

So there. Those are my admissions.

1. I'm too busy.

2. I'm a time racist.

I'm not proud of either of these things. I am hoping they will both cease to be true, certainly as much as they are now, and hopefully I will one day meet my friend's baby. Not, I hope, at the baby's twenty-first birthday party. I also hope to meet the abovementioned friend-of-a-friend, provided I can look her in the eye without wanting to defenestrate myself in horror at my own inadequacies as a human being.

In the meantime, I will try to love the complex relationship I have with the limited non-writing-time I experience, and hopefully the time-racism will lead to a mutual respect and I will learn to love again. Although I would like it noted in the minutes of this Time-Racist-Annonymous Meeting that I will never, ever love the hours between 4am and 9am. Under no circuspants.

As promised below (stupidly - why do I promise anything here? In order to doom it to never be done?) I will now attempt to persuade you that going to a literary festival is an excellent thing entirely and should be done by all and indeed sundry. It's not absolutely compulsory to be a nerd.

Firstly, writers' festivals are not entirely about writing. The one I've just come back from, the Sydney Writers' Festival, was about: crime, the brain, eventology (I know, right?), heroin, conspiracy, murder, morality, death, greed, revenge, obfuscation, corruption, identity, losing things, finding things, betraying people, quantum physics, Peter Costello, orgasms, and why David Williamson is a furious and irrelevant shouty man.

I loved Robyn Archer, who talked about dangerous or weird or interesting or new art deserving funding in a risk-averse society that tends towards (and this is where I provide my own example like a good arts student) reviews like this when confronted with a show that doesn't involve a creaky revolving set built to look like a house in Toorak and clearly meant as a metaphor for society's swirfggmmzzzzzzzzzzzzz sorry, what?

In short, Robyn Archer is one of those rare arts administrators who does not talk about the arts in a way that makes artists wonder what she's talking about (football? physics? apiary?). Instead, I sat there thinking "I've thought that exact thing but haven't yet been articulate enough to say it outside of my own brain". Refreshing. Not to mention funny. Not to mention she got her own standing ovation from a woman in the fourth row just for arriving to the session in the first place.

I also loved Norman Doidge's talk on neuroplasticity. I didn't know I had neural pathways, let alone elastic ones. Read his book. It will change your brain. In a good way.

Of course, the three of us (Stew, Rita, mygoodself) saw many more sessions and learned a giant heap of stuff. That's the best thing about finding out stuff. The more you know, the more the know you don't know.

Hence, nerd.

Dammit. I think I just unproved my own point. This is why I'm not a lawyer.

Ways in which the first week of solid writing is like a hangover:

1. The journey from yay to ouch is far more rapid and unflattering than you expected. Being excited about an idea is so tantalising. Having to figure out how that idea works is a struggle akin to being vertical after a night of free vodka shots and eighties-dancing in an unknown bar with persons whose names escape you.

2. It feels all foggy and slow and headachey and you feel kind of stupid and clumsy and directionless and unmotivated and you resent yourself for allowing it to be like this. To fix this problem, you must eat unfeasible amounts of toast.

3. You cannot believe what a monumental dork you were last night, or, in the case of the writer, what a monumental dork you were when you thought this idea was remotely clever in the first place. Slices of your idiocy eclipse your brain, crippling all other neural pathways except for the neurone responsible for the consumption of toast. In this first week of writing, I rediscover problems. It isn't until week 2 that I can solve them.

4. Nobody else feels sorry for you. You knew this was coming. You brought it on yourself. If you didn't want to be here, you shouldn't have stood on a table at 4am shouting "dance-off!" while a sartorially splendid gentleman with a parasol over his elbow took down team names in a spirax notebook.

5. You will, I promise, wake from this. Refreshed, bright-eyed, keen and totally flummoxed as to what demon had possessed you. When that happens, please don't judge your former self. It isn't fair. I'm trying. Me, with my nutella toast and my earl grey, I'm trying here.