typical working week...
Added on 21 November 2007
A typical working week...On Monday One of Two, my eldest spawn, was off school with a bad cough, and so nothing got done. She's not the stick in front of the tv and she'll let you get on type. Not that I ever feel like being particularly creative when there's a child marauding around the house. Any time you can get interrupted by the plaintive wail of the despairing bairn, it just sucks the creative juice from you. We played cards, went shopping, ate junk food. A typically indulgent parental day.
On Sunday - just to go back a day in a Tarrantino-esque shift of linear time - we went speed skating for the first time this season. What do you call speed skating when it's done very, very, very slowly? We had speed skates - the blade is longer than in regular Torvill & Dean skates - and were skating round a circular racing track, so it was actual speed skating. Just done at a pace which defies the word speed. I like Mince skating. Any relation with what we were doing compared to these guys you see on tv whizzing round in powerful elegance, was entirely coincidental. Give it another two or three decades of practice however...
Yesterday I spent making a six minute video to put on another page of this site. Was going to put it on YouTube until I decided that it probably surpassed most people's attention span for an author they haven't heard of by at least five and a half minutes.
Today, just not switched on at all. Can't focus. A non-writing day, although I never give those up and go and watch a movie or anything. I always sit here, waiting for inspiration, getting bored and frustrated. And so, two weeks in, still haven't started the book. Not worried about this, as I'm fairly confident I know where the novel is going once I manage to get into it.
Another blip in the process is that our laptop has just packed up, a seemingly terminal occurrence. I was wondering whether to try to get sponsorship for my replacement laptop. As my part of the deal I could change the title of the book to Hewlett Packard's Lost in Juarez, or Lost in Juarez With A Vaio, or Lost in Panasonic With Intel Core Solo UV1400 CPU.
Last week I did read an excellent comment piece by Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian about the squashing of personal freedom in Britain, which is what Lost in Juarez is all about; that counts as research, I guess, so I can at least feel that I've done fifteen minutes of work in the last week.