April

Well, let's just admit it.

I've been slack.

Worse than that, I've not only been slack, I've been lazy. Which is probably the same thing but in my mind, slack is not being able to keep up with all the tasks one sets themselves or the tasks that have been set by others. Lazy is just not even bothering to set oneself tasks. In all honesty, there has been more lazy than slack, although both have played their part.

The last couple of weeks, maybe longer, alright the whole of March and perhaps part of February, have been attacked by the lazy fly. He sits on my shoulder and his sheer weight keeps me from ever getting up off the couch.

On the other shoulder lies the procrastination fly that likes to be entertained with mindless internet sites, TV shows, and anything else that requires only a minimal attention span.

But with Easter just passed and 4 whole days off which is awesome and kudos to the bloke that made it all happen, it was time to get the Flyspray and get to work. Which I did, even though I woke up with some sort of deathly plague cold flu thing which still hasn't left me.

So, things are back on track. Somewhat. What I did manage to do in March inbetween checking Facebook 75,000 times a day was get my submissions up to date and it's only the first week of April and I'm already half way through the ones I need to get done for April. Hoorah for me.

I also completed a first draft of a new ten minute play called So Much Harm which is just the best title anyone has ever come up with, ever, and you all know it, so shut up.

Then, if that wasn't good enough, and it really really was, I dived headfirst into writing the first draft of my new full-length The Reading Group which is now up to Page 20. Awesome behaviour.

March also saw a trip back to the homeland (aka Brisbane) for my nephew's first birthday and it seems that the play a day reading cycle got way behind. But, as the good girl that I am, Easter saw me read 10 (yes, count them, 10!) plays and so we are all up to date on that one. I still have to play catchup with the screenplays/watching movies and short stories. But I'm getting there.

I even (almost) bounced out of bed this morning at 4.00am and wrote for nearly three hours.

I have a feeling that April is going to be a good month.

Weekly Update

Again, it didn't seem as if I was doing much last week but for a girl that has a full-time job I managed to do a lot of things that weren't photocopying and, uh, more photocopying. And trust me, there was a lot of that.

But the main thing I did this week was submissions. Although I didn't actually submit a lot (only 3) I did get all the bits and pieces for my brand spanking new full-length play New Light Shine. And there are a lot of bits and pieces. A lot of printing and a lot of thinking about how to write a freaking synopsis for it. So there was that.

I'm still having a lot of problems in balancing things, or how do you get enough time and motivation to do everything you want to do? Answers in 25 words or less please. I did read something on the internet quite a while ago about the top 50 (or something) habits of highly successful people. These were things they all seemed to share in common which astounded me straight off that they had that many things in common but one of them was that no matter what their mood, they always showed up and did the job. This has stuck with me and this is what I am going to try and do this week. No matter the mood, turn up and do the job.
Also, it seems that I tend to lose a lot of time in small increments. A lot of five minute slabs of time go down the drain because what can you do in 5 minutes? I don't know but I think I will have to try and find out. There are so many things that I want to do and accomplish and other people seem to be able to fit a lot more ino their life than I do which leads me to the idea that, uh, perhaps it is me.

I think this week, in an effort to combat the desire to do not much at all I am going to try a few experiments to see if I can get the workrate up.

My first experiment is to use my idle work hours to get submission information for various theatres that I want to send my play New Light Shine to. Because, really, how many times should you look at Facebook every day.

My second experiment is to write in 10 minute slots. I don't have enough time to write for much longer than that and I need to kind of look like I'm working even though I'm not. So ten minutes is a good time.

These are the missions for this week. Procrastination. Consider yourself at war.

Tonight

Tonight I'm going to try and finish my epic play New Light Shine. I have three scenes left and the house to myself. It's going to be go, go, go and hopefully at some time before I collapse into bed, I am going to get to write THE END!

Which as we all know are the two greatest words in the world.

How to Skin a Cat

Perhaps I have chanced upon what it needed to stop my obsession with the internet when I am at work. Small tasks. Because I'm perfectly fine when I have actual work to do but when I don't I'm googling random people I knew in primary school and obsessing over the careers of other playwrights. NO MORE! Small tasks, which is what I did today. And while I had a lot of actual work to do, I also got a few things crossed off my to-do list. VICTORY!

Progress on The Sandy Method

Well, contrary to my wonderful and hardly thought out plan, the play didn't get written in one weekend. 30 pages of it did get written, and now has been edited back to 20 pages.

So while the Sandy Method hasn't been the roaring success that it promisd itself to be, it wasn't exactly a complete failure either.

What did I find out by applying the Sandy Method?

That it is extremely possible to write a 1,000 words an hour, it's finding the hours that are free of distractions.

It terrifies me how easily I succumb to distraction. The slightest thing - a bird, a TV in the background, THE INTERNET, can completely rip me away from the task at hand.

What is worse is that I don't know how to get better at it. I'm sure there are like brain training exercises that improve concentration. Are there? Is this an actual thing, or am I just being lazy?

Stay tuned for answers to these things and much, much more.

4.00 am

Which is when I have been getting out of bed, making a cup of coffee and hten getting back into bed and writing until 6.45 am. It's an odd time of day, especially in summer when it gets light pretty early so that 4.00am is really the tail end of night. I've been telling people that I get up that early because it's quiet and I can work in peace. But that's hardly ever true. The birds alone create some sort of GET THE FUCK UP morning choir and then there are various planes, trains and automobiles who have no consideration for what time it is or the fact that there is a writer trying to work. But all of that doesn't seem to distract me. It's only when the humans start to move and shake into the day that the real distractions happen.

Experiment

Well, there were some definite results for the little experiment to see if I could write at night and still get as much done as I did when I get up at the godawful time of 4.00 am.

And the answer is ... NO!

I don't know what happens at night but there is just no time. No time! And there are distractions. People call, the boyfriend wants to do unreasonable things like speak to me, and then he wants to eat. I mean, COME ON!

So, it is back to the 4.00 am starts. Which is going to be hell but I probably just have to harden the fuck up.

New plans

Well, now comes the real test on how to do everything on my gorgeously obese list and still remain relatively sane. I started a new job that will continue for mostly the first half of this year and while it will bring some much needed cash to my barely breathing bank account, it will take many important hours away from my day.

Yesterday, the first day, I woke up at 4.00 am and worked till about 7.00 am. I spent the rest of the day with toothpicks in my eyes to keep myself awake. But that's okay. At least something got done. I didn't get much else done when I got home last night as I watched the minutes tick by until I could reasonably declare stumps and head to bed.

I didn't wake up at 4.00 am this morning. Which may turn out to be folly and I will live to regret it but I thought I would try and see if I could write tonight and then compare notes on which is better. I would like to write at night because 4.00 am is just so awful it makes it all seem like work. Which it is, but it really shouldn't feel like it.

So that is the plan for today. Work tonight, see if what I do tonight is any better than what I did yesterday and then repeat until finished.

Back to Basics

So, it's been a tough couple of days. I'm blaming the heat on the lack of actual work down but maybe the heat is only partly to blame. Maybe it is just me, and my tendency to want to take the laziest path possible. And sitting on the couch watching 30 Rock seems like a much better option than sitting at my desk and doing some actual work. It sometimes just feels too hard. And while I sit on the couch, the voice of doubt starts to creep in, getting louder and louder until very very quickly, it all looks a bit hopeless. Actually quite a bit more than a bit. And then it all crumbles to pieces.

Thank god I started this list. It's a constant reminder that motivation and achievement are hard won battles that need constant attention.

So, the first two days of the week were pretty much a write-off except for the writer's residency application but I got back on the writing horse this morning and am working my little heart out on the enxt draft of a full-length play New Light Shine and am starting to make some real progress on it. I hope to keep working on it for the rest of the week and have a whole chunk of it done by the end of the week.

It looks like I'm going back to day job work next week so I need to get myself prepared before the majority of my hours is taken over by soul-sucking tasks. Oh, the humanity.

Back to the battle.

HEAT

Oh, I hate this time of year. Hate, hate, hate. Have I made myself clear? And it's all due to one thing. HEAT. It's unbelievable. Having grown up in the great town of Brisbane, Queensland, I know about heat. It's hot all the time there, even in winter. But it ends. It gets hot during the day and then it drops at night. Not to a liveable level but there is always some difference between day heat and night heat.

The same does not apply for little ol' Melbourne. It gets hot, it stays hot, it's 3.00am and it's 30 degrees celcius. And then there is a thunderstorm at breakfast and then it's cold, cold, cold. It's weird and it should be stopped.

Anyway, yesterday was one of those days when it was 30 degrees by breakfast and then just kept getting hotter. Days like this see all my lovely work plans evaporate before they hit the page, and all I can do is lie in various states of undress and vow never to complain about the winter this year. This of course won't happen but I keep on vowing.

However, in the somewhat cooler light of day this morning, I found that in my hear-induced insanity yesterday, I managed to completely rethink a full-length play I had been struggling with for at least two years. I employed the Keep It Simple Stupid method and suddenly found that it was starting to work. IT'S WORKING! Which is completely and utterly exciting and reason enough to forget that I did practically nothing yesterday and get cracking with everything on my current to-do list today.