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.

The Standing There Productions Diary - the one you are currently reading - was set up so we could track the creative progress and technical development of our projects, whatever they turned out to be. Well, that was about four years ago and lately I've been less than forensic in filling you in on those details.

It has, of late, been what my first year English Literature lecturer would have called "a time of great social upheaval". I've spoken of him here before, I'm sure. My first ever experience of being a university student came a year before I attended university. I was part of a program with the rather Orwellian title of "the Enhancement program", wherein year twelve students undertook a first year undergraduate literature subject on top of our normal curriculum and also on top of having crushes on, fights with, and, in one memorable case, an actual sword fight (the drama teacher took a phone call), with our peers and colleagues.

Anyway, point is, in our "enhancement class", our poor lecturer was immediately imbued with all of our ideas of what our university would become. We thought we were sophisticated, feisty and academically bold. We thought he, our lecturer, was absurdly educated, wrily amusing and probably directly descended from Plato. He was, and remains, a gentleman by the name of Kevin Foster (see? Even the name works! And here is Kevin on the actual internets, continuing to live up to his reputation as a widely read history freak with Stories To Tell). I still believe he is all of those things, by the way, although the descended-from-Plato thing might be slightly difficult ot prove.

But I digress. Within this context, Kevin Foster said to us, "If you decide to continue studying arts subjects at university, you will be told the following in every single subject you ever enrol in, without exception: this subject is about a time of great social upheaval".

Kevin Foster, let me tell you, was not wrong. It got to the point, in my arts degree as well as my law degree, where I would simply write at the top of page one of my exercise book: TGSU. They said it every time. There is not a time in history, nor is there a movement in literature or politics or legal theory, whose context is not able to be summarised as follows: TGSU.

So. It feels weak, somehow, and dishonest, to say that, at the moment, Standing There Productions is undergoing a time of great social upheaval. Even if it were possible to stretch the metaphor and declare this point in time as a Cold War - no stage show, no auditions, just writing and meeting people and creating potentially explosive outcomes - the TGSU label still applies, and it still means nothing, and thus I am lost in a cliche.

Therefore, here is something useful I can say: at the moment, gloriously, I am able to write. I am writing what I want to write - I have an actual aim in mind - and Rita and Stew and I are meeting regularly to talk our way through the kinds of questions we're usually asking ourselves over a wavering Skype video connection at 11pm (including things like: "Are you wearing GOLD pyjamas Rits?" and "Sorry, that's my knee, I'll move over. There. Now where were we?")

So. Let's see how this goes for us. I'll post a few bits about the writers' festival here next. In the meantime, yay for writing and reading and teachers who inspire you, and working with friends who wear gold pyjamas and don't think you're an idiot for leaving the keys in the front door of your house.

Good news for those of you who are me: I'm about to write for a while.

This is excellent news for me because it means I can concentrate on one thing at one time. And it's a thing I love doing, too.

Where the problem arises, you may have noticed, is when I have too many things to do and therefore write things like "wnat", as in "If you wnat something done, ask a busy person".

Well, apparently that is not always the case. The other day, par example, I almost sent the parliamentary member for the area I am visiting for work... a timesheet outlining the hours I had worked on the project I was MEANING to send him a running sheet for.

I am sure this happens to important people, such as that guy who runs the UN. I'm sure every now and then he fedexes someone his shopping list instead of the financial papers relating the Uruguay incident or whatever and I'm sure when he gets an opportunity to focus on one thing and do it, and enjoy it, he relishes it.

I intend to do the smae.

Just kidding. Same. I intend to do the same.

You know what they say, don't you.

They say, if you want something done, ask a busy person.

Mind you, they also say early to bed early to rise, so as far as I'm concerned they're a bunch of sucks who should quite frankly pipe down before one more person says that to me and I accidentally hurl them from a moving train.

Anyway. Thing is, we've been busy. Stew, Rita and I have been busy, as a result of which I have not been updating this page as regularly as I once did.

Be assured, however: things are being done. We're not entirely sure what, and by whom, and by when, but the barrista trade remains fairly robust in the Fitzroy/Carlton area and in certain parts of Sydney when Stew and Rita and I are meeting up in order to have lots of meetings and then meet about those meetings before drawing up documents summarising meetings that we plan to have at a future date to finalise details of the original meetings.

I'm sure they say something about this, too.

Those smug bastards.