Category Archives: Timeulus Vacuumulus

Jan 25 2013

30 Before 30: #10 Go Sledging

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If you’re daft enough to follow me on Twitter (and if you don’t, you should. I’m really very good at Twittering), you’ll know that on Friday and Saturday I was sulking because even though it was snowing in the UK, it hadn’t snowed enough for me to go sledging. To be more accurate – it had snowed enough to facilitate sledging almost everywhere else, but not where I live.

Sledging is one of my 30 before 30. It’s not that I haven’t been sledging before, I have – I did lots of sledging when I was a kid and when it used to snow lots. But that’s exactly the point. Maybe, when I was younger, I assumed that it would snow every year, and every year I could go sledging. Maybe I never quite realised that sometimes, it wouldn’t snow at all. And maybe I failed to realise that as I grew up, sledging would become much less of a priority and that there would even come a time where I might be considered “too old” to go sledging. Somehow, I’d never factored any of this in.

The last time I remember going sledging was with my brother in a nearby field. We built ramps out of the snow and even though I was so cold I felt like my fingers were going to drop off (despite the gigantic mittens my mum had sent me outside with), it was the most fun ever and it’s one of my fondest childhood memories.

After that, there was a bit of a snow lull for quite a few years. I mean it would get cold, it would get icy, it might even snow but it was only ever an icing-sugar dusting and would be gone again within a day or so.

Childhood disappeared, quickly followed by my teens and as I hit my twenties I realised I was growing up and there wouldn’t be another opportunity to go sledging, y’know because, I was becoming an “adult”. Worse still, I wouldn’t be able to go sledging with my brother in the field near our house because he was already an adult. A proper one. With a job and everything. Also, my parents had moved house so we didn’t live near that field anymore. And also the sledge went to a charity shop when my parents moved house. All things considered, it didn’t look I was going to go sledging ever again.

So I just got on with being a grown up. Soon, I had a job and paid taxes and went to the supermarket for my weekly shop and did things like report the faulty boiler to the landlord. Maturity brings a certain amount of responsibility. The older you get, the more responsibilities you get. The more responsibility you get, the less childish amazing fun stuff you can do. That’s just science.

Responsibility graph

Then, when I was in my mid-twenties, we had two really snowy winters. It was so snowy in both of those years, that I landed a WHOLE DAY off work in each year.

But I did not go sledging.

Perhaps, by this point, I’d admitted defeat. I must have waited twenty years for it to snow enough to go sledging with my brother and now we were adults and it wasn’t going to happen. So I just stayed home and watched DVDs.

Then we had a couple snow-free winters, and I kept catching myself looking out of the window and hoping it would snow enough to go sledging. So when I wrote my 30 before 30 list, I decided that ‘going sledging’ should definitely go on there. If it snowed again before I was 30, I would definitely go sledging and just get it out of my system.

So, fast-forward to Sunday. The light spattering of snow we’d had here was already disolving into a grey, icy mush. It looked very much like another sledge-free winter was going to pass me by.

Then my friend (also called Jo)and I arranged to take our dogs for a walk in a small town near the pennines… Where there was substantially more snow. “Shall I bring the sledge?” she asked.

This is all very mathmatical and complicated, so please consult the equation below:

Snow equation

Finally, I went sledging.

And I was chased my puppy Izzy (the one wearing a high-visibility dog coat) and my friend Jo’s dog, Dillon (the dog shaped one).

Sledging with dogs

Nov 27 2012

30 Things to do before I’m 30

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This blog post has been in the works for quite a while (about 4 months). I’ve come close to posting it so many times and at the last moment, talked myself out of it again. Last week some friends on Twitter were talking about the 101 in 1001 lists thingy and I decided that it was time to post this. It’s still taken me another week to overcome inertia, so I’m posting it now before I give myself the opportunity to back out again. Apologies for any typos, I’m just sick of reading this over and over and then deciding not to post it. This is a long one btw, so grab a cup of tea and pull up a chair… Jo.

You may or may not have noticed that I’ve been a little internet-absent recently. Normally when this happens I come back with some blog post or other plagued with apologies and excuses. This time it’s different (and no, it’s not because I had to go to rehab following my Snickers addiction).

A few months ago I realised that I am now, officially, in my late twenties. I am 28 and a half (ish) years old. That means that in a year and half (ish) I’m going to be 30. I know that’s not an overly distressing thing in itself, but it prompted me to think about my twenties and wonder what, if anything, I have been doing with my life so far.

I started to think about the things I have done, but mostly, I thought about all the things I haven’t and I wondered why that might be.

Let’s go back to when I was about 6 or 7 years old. At this point in my life all of my friends had birthday parties at a place called The Big Buddy Bear Club which was a massive play area (ball pools, slides, tunnels, rope ladders etc.). The Big Buddy Bear Club was the place to have birthday parties. It was excessively good fun, for most kids.

I’m sure that given the amount of times I actually went to The Big Buddy Bear Club I probably had fun at least once, but all I remember is that I once got stuck in a tunnel and I found it very scary and upsetting.

I was crawling through a tunnel which had a gap in it. To cross the gap, I had to crawl across a rope bridge. As I approached the rope bridge I stopped. I wasn’t keen on crossing the rope bridge – it just didn’t feel safe. My gut instinct told me to go back the way I came, but there were kids behind me and I was too shy/scared/socially awkward to ask if I could crawl past them so I closed my eyes and hurriedly crawled across the bridge before pulling into a side tunnel and bursting into tears.

Even though I didn’t fall, and the rope bridge didn’t disappear beneath me, and nothing bad happened at all, I couldn’t bring myself to continue further down the tunnel. And I couldn’t bring myself to go back across the rope bridge, either. Supposedly, facing your fears means you overcome them. For me, it merely confirmed that I definitely found crawling across a rope bridge incredibly scary and that I didn’t want to do it again.

And so I sat there in the tunnel and cried. I cried about being too scared to go forwards and too scared to go backwards. All because of a totally non-threatening rope bridge especially designed for children of my age, height and weight to crawl across.

As I sat there sobbing loads of other kids crawled by. Some would give me a quizzical look before going on their way, others didn’t notice me.  Once again, being incredibly shy, I was too scared to ask one of them to help me get out of the tunnel. So I just sat there and all I could think about was how everyone in The Big Buddy Bear Club was having masses of fun except me. And maybe some other kid who was throwing up in the ball pool or something.

Eventually, after I can’t even remember how long, some girl I didn’t know saw me crying and helped me back across the rope bridge and back to where lot’s of extremely bored-looking parents were sitting on a bench drinking coffee and waiting for the party to be over. I sat with the bored parents until the end of the party, watching all the other kids playing and having ridiculous amounts of fun. I wanted to go back, but I told myself not to. It just wasn’t worth it, what if I got stuck somewhere else? What if next time, no one found me and I’d just get left there?

This is pretty much the story of my life. I’m scared of everything. When I face something I find scary I don’t conquer my fear, I simply reinforce the fact that, yes, I really do find that thing scary.

This is, apparently, how I roll. I seem to fear things I’m perfectly capable of doing, just in case something terrible happens. And so I sit on the side, crying, too scared to go forwards and hoping that, eventually, someone much more confident than I am will find me and I can go home.

Whenever I have taken ‘risks’ (and I mean that in the broadest possible sense of the term) I feel like things work out badly, and I regret taking that risk… And then that puts me off ever taking any other sort of risk or impulsive action ever again… Ever.

So now I ring-fence myself into ‘playing it safe’ that is: avoiding all the things that scare me, not making any decisions, and hoping that maybe one day everything will just work out for the best and I’ll be happy. I stop myself from making any decisions just in case I make a bad one that might make me unhappy.

So here I am. Nearly 30 and well and truly fenced into my comfort zone. This doesn’t result in a particularly satisfying life.

When I started thinking about what I have done this past decade, I realised that I’ve moved house more times than I care to remember, eaten a lot of pizza and watched a lot of films. I also passed my driving test, but I’m too scared to actually drive a car. And I wrote a novel… with no story.

I’ve realised that a combination of life anxiety and an unrelenting fear of failure has left me in this situation. I can either shrug my shoulders to it all and say that this is just the way I am, or I could do something (even if it’s a fairly small thing) to change.

In the interests of turning 30 and knowing that I’m heading in the right direction (or at the very least, be safe in the knowledge that I did more than move house and eat pizza) I’ve decided to make a change.

I started making a list of things I wanted to do before I’m 30. It’s kind of like a bucket list – minus  the  swimming-with-dolphins cliché and having death as the deadline. There are only 30 things on my list, but some of them might take me a while to complete. Others are small things that I’ve wanted to do for while but never got around to doing them – or simply because it’s easier not to bother.

I’m sharing this with you, Internet, to force myself to actually do the things on this list instead of flaking out like I normally do.

And I figured that since I’m sharing my list with the internet, I may as well write about each of them here. I foresee most of these things going spectacularly wrong (all part of the fun/learning curve, right?), and I’m more than happy to share those experiences for your amusement (you’re welcome).

Still reading? Excellent. Without further ado, here’s the list:

30 before 30 – The List

1. Join the Anthony Nolan register.

2. Have something (anything) published and be paid for it.

3. Begin to pay off my student debt.

4. Do volunteer work.

5. Be a confident driver (i.e. not have a panic attack when facing the prospect of getting in the car).

6. Write a new novel and complete my MA.

7. Learn how to play chess.

8. Take a yoga or meditation class.

9. Eat lobster.

10. Go ice-skating/sledging.

11. Learn a bit of Spanish.

12. Host a dinner party.

13. Walk the Three Peaks.

14. Try out for a roller derby

15. Have a party with a bouncy castle.

16. Master using WordPress

17. Go to a music festival.

18. Watch the films I haven’t watched (list to follow).

19. Go out for brunch.

20. Go to a drive-in movie.

21. Visit Edinburgh.

22. Do all the touristy bits of London you’re supposed to do when you’re a tourist.

23. Do a pub crawl.

24. Knit a scarf.

25. Do all the things I was too scared to do as a child (list to follow).

26. Own a round wicker chair.

27. Be a vegetarian for a week (or maybe a month).

28. Go on a random trip without planning any of it.

29. Stay up for 24 hours.

30. Work in the field for which I received my degree.

There’s a reason for why each of these things went onto the list, but I’ll explain each when I blog about them (because otherwise, this is going to be the longest blog post ever).

Jan 11 2012

Post Christmas, Post New Year, New Year’s Post…

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I don’t know about you, but I need a holiday (perhaps at a health spa) to get over Christmas – which was ages ago, I realise, but I’m still reeling from it. My last post was on December 20th – and every day after that has seemed to involve some serious amounts of Christmas. This was probably because it was nearly Christmas, and despite my best efforts to be feverishly organised (which involved having many, many, many lists) things still fell apart.

After the flooding incident during my brother and sister-in-law’s stay (in which the kitchen sink filled with hot rust sick water anytime the bathroom was used), there was a serious amount of housework to do, and for whatever reason, even more laundry than usual. Laundry seemed to be everywhere I looked. Where was it coming from? Laundry spewed from the laundry bin, from the creel, the bannister, the washing machine, the radiators – and there was more to come. It was like some kind of laundry epidemic had taken place. Hours of the day seemed to simply dissolve as I separated sheets from towels, wool from cotton, pants from more pants and then eventually cramming them all into the washing machine just to have it out of my sight.

Then there were the last minute presents. I had been relatively well-organised this year and managed to actually get everything at a reasonable time rather than my usual stunt of ignoring Christmas until it’s too late. In a completely mad twist, I only bought one present online. Everything else, I physically went out into the world to buy with real-life money, and carried it home in my bare hands. Despite the organisation (and not waiting on delivery men), there were still a few items that I had foolishly left until the last minute. This is classic me  (fuck-it-up-itis), the moment I realise that I’m actually doing well at something, (in this case, buying Christmas presents on time), I seem to stop doing it. This is how the logic goes:

Fuckitupitislogic

Having escaped the depths of the laundry nightmare to go on an emergency shopping trip to pick up the last few presents, I realised that there were more things I had left until the last minute. Like buying Christmas food and cooking it. Sorry, learning how to cook it, and then actually cooking it.

As I pulled into the supermarket car park Christmas eve afternoon, I found myself yearning to be back at home with the now infinite amounts of ironing. Cars were parked on top of each other. People had parked their cars in the trolley park, they had parked in the bus lane and in hedges and all I could think was “Why have all of these people left it until the last minute?” I then, in the true spirit of Christmas, I cursed them profusely for being so disorganised.

For the first time in my whole life, my Mum was not Christmas coordinator this year. She had nothing to do with Christmas 2011, the responsibility had been handed out across our family. While Christmas day itself fell to my Aunt, I would be hosting Boxing day. In every previous year, Christmas has been a strategic operation which has been carefully organised by my parents. My Mum is a one-woman social and catering committee, whereas my Dad seems to spend a lot of time creating Excel spreadsheets to manage who is buying what present for whoever, and placing online purchases. They have operated as some sort of Christmas headquarters for years. If you were struggling to buy a present, you could ring them up, day or night, shrieking “I DON’T KNOW WHAT AUNT HILARY WANTS FOR CHRISTMAS – SHE’S ALLERGIC TO EVERYTHING” and my Dad would consult his Christmas spreadsheet and calmly say “It’s fine, she wants The Sound of Music on DVD”. Problem solved. So when all these responsibilities shifted, things got a bit wonky. Or at least, for me anyway.

On Christmas eve, two hours before I was due at my parents house for dinner, I was weeping down the phone to my mother because I was cooking ham for the first time and it “just didn’t look right” and because I felt that the calm picture of Nigella Lawson staring back at me from the recipe book was mocking me.

Nigella Christmas

I returned from my parents’ at half past midnight. It was, technically, Christmas day. And while I had (only just) bought all of the gifts I needed, I hadn’t actually wrapped a single one of them. Or cooked the turkey saddle for Boxing day.

And so, my Christmas mission continued and I wrapped my presents while watching a terrible Christmas film starring Melissa Joan Hart (star of hit 90s TV shows Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Clarissa Explains It All) and Mario Lopez (who played A.C. Slater, wrestler and mullet-wearer in the original Saved By The Bell). It was awesome. But sadly, I didn’t get to see the end of it, because I convinced myself, once I had finished wrapping all my presents at 2:30am, that the sensible thing to do would be to go to bed, and not to continue watching a terrible Christmas film, purely because it starred two people from shows I loved in the 90s.

So I went to bed.

And three hours later, I woke up again, worrying that I had not yet cooked the Boxing day turkey saddle. An hour later, having tossed and turned the idea in my mind as much as I tossed and turned in bed, I decided seeing as I was awake thinking about it, I should just get up and cook it.

By 9am Christmas morning, I had cooked the turkey and painted my fingernails and watched Home Alone.

It is impossible to make it through Christmas without watching at least one John Hughes film…

Things continued in this bizarre and disjointed way right up until the end of last week, when I finally made it to the end of all the food I had left from classic over-catering which comes with Christmas season (this involved eating a cheese-board in its entirety).

So, many, many apologies for not wishing all my readers a Merry Christmas – I truly hope you had a good one, and I suppose I’m not too late to wish you a (belated) Happy New Year.

P.S. I also owe lots of emails, text messages and phone calls. If you’re someone who is owed one, and you’re reading this, then rest assured you’re reply is currently on a list somewhere, and I’m going to get back to you real soon…

 

I’d like to dedicate my first post of 2012 to my Mum and Dad – for being crazily organised at Christmas, and never losing their cool. My Mum has done a family Christmas every year I’ve been alive, and has  never once cried, or told a piece of meat to ‘fuck off’, and still finds the time to make us all a nice cup of tea whenever we want one.

Jul 5 2011

How TV Ruined My Life…

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It’s coming up to three weeks since I last wrote a blog post, and I should warn you that by no means, will this post make up for it.

 

If you haven’t closed your web browser, or navigated yourself elsewhere and you’re still reading this, then you should probably reconsider. I’ll give you a moment (you’re welcome).

 

Still here? You crazy. Here’s today’s post:

 

Despite all my fantastically amazing intentions to write as much as possible, sometimes I quickly admit defeat and other life type stuff appears and completely destroys my writing schedule (suggesting I even have one). It isn’t long before it’s been a week since I last wrote, then two weeks and then three. Eventually, once things have simmered down, I know I’ll have to get back on the horse.  And getting back on the writing horse is always a bit of a pisser.

I know this. I know this fact so well I torture myself with it while I’m loafing on the sofa watching repeat episodes of Friends for the 8 millionth time. I am so overly aware of this fact, that I’ve already written a post about it. Twice.

But after a slog in the office or a weekend plagued with late nights and hangovers (that’s right, I get out), I’ll happily opt for slumming it on the sofa in my pants over writing a blog post about not writing because I’ve been at karaoke parties, torturing people I’ve never met before by shouting my way through Prince’s 1999 (seriously, no matter how much you think you know this song, you don’t. I learned the hard way).

Don’t get me wrong, it’s hard to justify that watching TV as a valid reason not to do any writing. It’s even harder to justify watching repeat episodes of Friends, which I’ve seen a buhzillion times, and have on DVD instead of writing, but I still do it. And just when I start to feel guilty about wasting my life away watching shows I practically know line for line, I start watching something else instead, something really crappy, like The Big Bang Theory, which I don’t even like. Eventually, guilt will set in and my psyche starts to use all this TV watching apathy as ammo against me and I’ll start asking myself why I’m  watching shows I’ve already seen/don’t even enjoy instead of writing.

To minimize the guilt, and justify TV watching further, I’ve been asking people to suggest other shows (ones I haven’t seen, and might enjoy more than The Big Bang Theory) that I can watch instead. Therefore, I can justify not writing, because I’m relaxing.

Seeing as words are failing me right now, here’s a diagram of what goes on in my head.

Writing not going to happen

When other life stuff starts happening all over the place, and you’re trying to juggle work and a suddenly very hectic social schedule (I know, I can’t believe it either) alongside all the usual crappy things (like laundry and ironing and visiting parents and going to the supermarket and crying at your bank balance), collapsing in front of the TV to watch, well, anything is more appealing than shifting your brain up a gear and getting creative and bashing out a blog post or another chapter in your sprawling novel that is taking forever to complete.

Underneath it all, I know this isn’t really a valid excuse. I know that really, I’ve given in to laziness. I know that even if I just did five minutes of writing a day, it would be better than not writing at all and merely spending hours snarling at how crap The Big Bang Theory is.

But I also know (or at least hope) that I’m not completely alone in this. So, when you’re other life stuff gets hectic, do you still make time to write? How do you discipline yourself, or do you also resign yourself to watching The Big Bang Theory even though it’s rubbish?

Answers on a postcard to the usual address.

Jun 14 2011

No. It’s nothing like “Twilight”…

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In my relatively limited experience of being a writer, I’ve found that the worst thing about writing a novel (apart from actually sitting down for long enough to write it) is talking to other people about it.

I’m so bad at talking about my work that I try not to mention that I’m writing a novel in conversation. This, in theory, should be fairly easy (it’s not as if people just come out with, “So, written any novels recently?” or anything) but if I’m small-talking with someone I don’t know and they’re asking me about myself, I tell them I want to be a writer and inevitably I come to tell them I’m writing a novel.

I hate telling people what my novel is about: Condensing a 200 page story into one, vaguely interesting summary, is tricky. When I think what my novel is about, I don’t know where to start.

So I either:

1. Stare blankly at the person who asked me. Then I say “er…” lots. Then I blush. Then I say that I don’t really know. Then I laugh nervously. Then I change the subject/run away in the opposite direction.

2. Take a deep breath, and embark on what is possibly the most boring and lengthy description of a book possible, punctuated with many fillers such as “sort of”, “kind of”, “um”, “er”, “if you know what I mean”, “if that makes any sense”. The other person quickly loses the will to live.

When it comes to talking about my novel, I’ve got a ‘fight or flight’ thing going on. Scenario 1 being flight – I know that my attempt to explain the book is going to be a disaster, so I simply abort the conversation entirely. Most of the time, I simply opt to run away, on the basis that I’d rather people think I am a bit crazy than think I’m a non-stop bore festival.

Which brings me to the second scenario, the ‘fight’ reaction, which I’m much less prone to doing because the other person gets this glazed over look on their face about 10 – 15 seconds into my 3000 hour explanation. They stop making eye-contact, they look at the floor, then out of the window, then search for the nearest exit, and after a minute – they’re pretty much checking themselves for a pulse.

When I start explaining what my book is about, I start off okay. I give a quick description of my main character and a rough outline of the story. In my brain, it’s all pretty clear.

My brain

But very quickly, my mind floods with a surplus of information. I start thinking about all the minor details, all the sub-stories, all the stuff that no one really needs to know about but I cram it into my synopsis anyway.

My brain2

I just stand there talking, thinking of more things to include as I go. And then I’m aware of how long I’ve been talking, and how bored the other person looks. But I’ve still got so much more to say and so I accelerate through more book talk, which only really turns what was a boring, convoluted description, into a fast-paced, unfathomable whirlwind of talk that means nothing to anyone, anywhere.

Eventually, once I notice the noose hanging around the neck of the person I’m talking to, I slam on the brakes and finally manage to stop talking.

There’s an awkward pause.

Then, they either run away, or start speaking to someone else.

And every now and again, they ask “So, it’s nothing like Twilight, then?” To which there is a very short answer: no.

Jun 9 2011

Kicking my own arse…

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Tuesday was painful. Really painful. It was painful because I deliberately cleared my schedule of all possible distractions so that I could work on my novel. I told myself that I only had one thing to achieve that day; to work on my novel. If I didn’t write a blog post, fine. If I didn’t do the washing up – also fine. If I didn’t go to the gym, fine again. But if it got to 5pm and I hadn’t done anything with my novel, then I was going to be in some serious shit. With myself.

That’s right. There’s no arse-kicker tougher than yourself – not if you’re me. No one kicks my arse harder than I do, no one is more guilt inflicting and self-punishing than I am when I’ve skipped out on working.

And so on Tuesday I really had to kick my arse. Because I had told myself to get up early and start work on my novel, and that I had no excuse not to. But when it came to it, the prospect of getting back into my novel after leaving it for so long was not in any way appealing. I sensed the hard work ahead of me and immediately became work-shy.

Then I was in a constant battle with myself for the entirety of the day. Somewhere between the good intentions and getting up at 8am and having my first cup of coffee things went seriously awry and by the time 10am came around, all I had done was flick between a blank MS Word document and my web browser -browsing for… anything on Amazon, and staring at my very empty email inbox.

This was the first wave of guilt, and once it hit, I disconnected myself from the internet. If I couldn’t trust me to have internet access and not use it while I was working, then I wouldn’t be allowed access to it at all.

So I removed my dongle and hid it in a box.

Then I got back to work. And I wrote three words. Then I stared out of the window. And then I deleted those three words. And then I stared out of the window. Then I made myself a coffee.

And by the time I’d drunk my coffee, I still hadn’t written anything. And so I sighed and told an empty room how difficult it is to write a novel.

Smash things

Then I sulked.

And then I swirled around in my Captain’s Chair a few times to cheer myself up. And then I wrote a sentence.

Then I stared out of the window again.

Then I made some lunch and I read my sentence while I ate lunch.

And I decided it wasn’t a very good sentence. So after lunch, I deleted it.

The day went on like this – I had to constantly wrestle myself back into my chair and keep my fingers affixed to the keyboard until typing happened and words started appearing on screen. I was close to tears by the time I had tapped out my first paragraph, but I told myself to keep going – that the hard part was over. Eventually I got back into the swing of it and by mid-afternoon I was working on a new chapter.

It was exhausting. I felt like I’d actually had to beat it out of myself – and not just metaphorically speaking.

I never realised this before, but the reason I procrastinate so much is because I dread this initial stage of writing so much that I’ll do anything to get myself out of it. Even though my intentions are good, (I’ll get up early and start work on my novel) my enthusiasm for writing is at an all time low, and I’ll happily do anything else instead.

pffft

Trying to get into the flow of writing without absolutely loathing every single word written and getting immediately frustrated after tapping out a sentence is teeth-gnashingly annoying. And it only gets worse over time. The longer I leave working on my novel, the worse I am at getting back into it.

After 3000 hours of dragging myself kicking and screaming back to my desk, I got to the end of my new chapter and I realised that I’d given the story a whole new direction to go in.

And after thinking about this little breakthrough, I decided to completely scrap another three chapters. And replace them with new ones. And change the order of the last third of the book.

Nice work, me.

Essentially, I gave me lots more work to do. Which is kind of a bummer, but at least I’ve made some progress and that sticking point I’ve been on for the last… six months, is finally coming unstuck.

Well, maybe not completely unstuck, but significantly less adhesive than it was before.

Jun 2 2011

Confessions of a novelist (and something about my new desk chair)…

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There are people I know, other writers, who manage an endless surplus of of other life-type stuff (careers, higher education, marriages, families) and still manage to write lots and often. There are proper, real life humans with actual grown up lives who wander around in their nice clothes and hair cuts with their mortgages and wedding rings and bank accounts and organic vegetables who are a lot more productive than I am.

I took last week off to focus on finally ending that blasted novel of mine. One full week with an entirely clear schedule and it was mine – all mine. A long stretch of time for me to sit down and wrestle with the shitty dialogue, the end of that chapter that seems a bit boring, those characters who are kind of meaningless, and at the end of the week I’d finally be on the road to completion. By the end of the week I could sit back and say: I wrote a novel. Get me. I totally wrote a novel. How many people can say that?

Answer: Quite a few. And I’m not one of them.

Because I didn’t spend last week working on my novel.

No.

Last week I got paid. And I decided to celebrate by purchasing a new desk chair from Ikea, and then celebrate my purchase of a new desk chair by eating Daim cheesecake in the Ikea cafe and then I spent the next few days constructing the new desk chair… And dismantling and rearranging other furniture to make room for the new desk chair and to make new desk chair feel welcome.

Because y’know, there’s no way I could finish the novel without buying a new desk chair. I mean, if you’re going to spend a week working on your masterpiece – you may as well do it in style while eating cheesecake in comfort.

Captain's Chair

Okay, so it’s a cruddy excuse. And even after the desk chair was constructed I did not open my novel and attempt to finish it. I surfed the internet and pretended to be Captain James Kirk.

When it comes to me, there’s always a reason not to write; the house is too messy, so I can’t concentrate, I need to go to the supermarket, I need a new desk/desk chair/room to work in, I’m too tired/hungry/stressed, I have back ache so I can’t sit at my desk for long, or I’m stuck.

Okay. So, it’s that last one which holds responsibility for all the other crappy excuses. I’m stuck. Really stuck. So stuck that I’m beginning to resent my stupid novel.

The truth is, I don’t think I’m that far away from finishing. There are two or three chapters which need redrafting, but for whatever reason, I can’t bring myself to do it.

I know I should sit down and simply take a look at what needs changing and try to work the problems out bit by bit, but as more time passes, the prospect of doing this becomes more and more daunting and I’m becoming more afraid of tackling the issue.

It’s becoming a monster.

Evil incomplete manuscript

Am I actually scared of finishing my novel? I mean, this isn’t just your average case of procrastination we’re talking about here – this is driving a considerable distance to eat Swedish cheesecake and pretending to be William Shatner…

Anyone got a number for a good psychiatrist?