Turn off the TV and do something more interesting instead.

Tuesday. August 6th. 2013. 23:55
Today was my nephew's birthday. He is now thirteen. Another teenager in the family. All we need. Considering that the pushed his brother through the (thankfully open) french doors at my sister's house the other day, he's kind of lucky to have made it this far.

The normal 'witty' card, and emailed Amazon voucher as a present. Does this make me a lazy giver ? Well, actually when it was the case that he was getting a bike for his birthday I had bought a new lock and rechargeable bike lights for him. Having changed his mind, and decided that learning to ride a bike was 'too much for him', that became a pointless thing to buy him.

Even though I had purchased them I am sure that I can still make use of them when I finally get round to buying a new bike.

So far this week I've not gotten much writing done. I've kidded myself that my online escaping into 'Second Life' is a valid alternative for spending my time. When I'm away on holiday I won't be able to go on Second Life. So I will miss my virtual world. When I say miss. I don't mean it like that. I don't actually go on it at all that much these days. When I first started it, I was on it for hours and hours every night. Now I probably only go on there for a couple of hours a week. 

I need to stop turning the Television on again. This seems to be the routine when I come in from work.

Get in.
Let cats out.
Turn on TV.
Slump in sofa.
Pointlessly surf the internet / check facebook.

Maybe, just maybe I will start some novel editing, or I will start a blog entry. I've done that a couple of times. But the TV gets in the way of any real focus. Trouble is, Star Trek Enterprise is on at 7pm every night.

As time goes on, it's becoming less and less easy to hide my inner nerd. When I say inner. I mean the inner most 98% of me.

This week has just been a non stop rollercoaster ride of fun.

The massive revelation last weekend that due to some poor planning and self control on my part, I have no freaking money. This has seen me taking food to work each day, instead of being a lazy idiot and buying stuff in the restaurant there. I say restaurant based not on how many stars it has, but the fact that it's a place where people go to get food and sit down and eat it. Here I am, on a Saturday morning sitting at the iMac with a cup of coffee and some marmite toast. Only problem being that I've actually ran out of Marmite, and that I've also ran out of spread.... so really I have dried toasted wholemeal bread with the dregs of the Marmite spread onto it. Hmmm. yum. I think if I ate a box it would taste better.

confusingly named 'shrapnel Jar'

That definitely means that it's time to get off my backside and get some food. Ah. One small little problem. Finance Error. Grrr. I guess I'm off to see if the shrapnel jar has enough for me to be able to buy a week's shopping out of it. Shrapnel Jar is in reality neither a jar, nor does it contain shrapnel.

Don't worry folks, the important thing is that I've got enough kitten food in to last the week. The kittens will most definitely not go hungry.

I'll be getting off this chair in a moment and taking myself and my 'shrapnel Jar' off to the nearest store that has one of those coin converter things that allow you to tip in wads of coinage such as contained in the above 'jar' and change it up into real money (well a voucher) that you can use to spend in the store.

Only thing is that the nearest two places that provide that facility aren't exactly nearby. One is the Tesco store in Havant (near where I work) the other is the Asda store in Fratton (further into Portsmouth). Really does require me getting up off my arse doesn't it ?

Here comes the rain again. (Is IT here yet ?)

Getting up at 7:20 on my day off is by no means something of a norm for me. I am revisiting that excited 'kid at christmas' feeling. Waiting not for some old guy to climb down a chimney we don't have and empty his sack. I await the delivery of my new shiny.

Will it get here before Helen does ? In all probability, yes. My iMac has come from the Netherlands, Helen comes from Buckland.

Meanwhile the weather has done a classic bait'n'switch job, and having raised my expectations yesterday with glorious spring like sunshine, has delivered for today, my day off, miserable cloud and rain. Does the weather have a regulator ? Offrain ?

I'm only rushing to the window every time I hear anything that I think sounds like a delivery van pulling up. Wouldn't be so bad, but living across from a school means that in the next hour literally hundreds of lazy parents will drive up and drop off their even lazier children. They may argue that its raining and they don't want their precious offspring to get wet, but it won't kill them, they are 70% water anyway. They can't get wetter than they already are, some of them. Drips only get bigger.

My new Apple shiny on the other hand will be hurt by rainfall. Clear the roads !! Man with Simon's new shiny (I'm assuming it's a man, it might not be) coming through !!

Have typewriter WONT travel.

After spending the first day of my holiday, not being on holiday (by
going into work) and having my daughter to stay overnight Saturday, I
guess I now start my holiday proper.
Everyone I speak to, that I tell that I'm going on holiday, will ask me,
'are you going anywhere'. No. I reply. I'm going to stay at home.
Sometimes I elaborate a little. Sometimes I don't. See the thing is, I
tell myself that the reason why I don't do as much writing as I would
like, is because I'm too stressed out from work to sit down and look at
a computer. Which we all know is rubbish, because anyone that knows me
will tell you that I spend my evenings with the computer, sometimes more
than one computer on. Just not doing anything useful with it.
Easy for me to blame work, but as I am now on holiday, I don't have that
excuse do I ? I've had some good days lately, where I've been due to be
at work late, so wouldn't normally get up until 10am. I've actually
gotten up much earlier and given myself a couple of hours first thing in
the morning to get some writing done. This indeed has worked, and I did
manage to get some pages done. Also the other week when I had a day off
midweek, likewise I got up stupidly early, for what was my day off, and
told myself I was going to be writing from 9am. And I was. The 'I've got
to be in the office by...' mentality seems to work for me. If I do the
writing at the other end of the day, then I find it very very easy to
come in from work, and a) put the TV on. That evil, evil thing in the
corner of the room that sucks away all my time. or, b) I sit down, and
think, 'I'll just give myself half an hour and then I'll start'. Well
that half an hour turns into an hour, turns into two, turns into three,
and then I tell myself 'oh, it's too late to start anything now, I'll
have a look tomorrow'. Tomorrow never comes. There's much
procrastination in my head. I find it very easy to talk myself out of
doing things, and that I can do them later on. It's funny, because I'd
never behave that way at work. At work, I'm always much more focussed
and driven by the power of the moment, and the yearn to 'just get things
done'.
I get too comfortable. I laze about.
When I have 'good writing days' I just get up, and get on with it. There
is no other common denominator than that. I love to read how other
people that write, have their methods, have their 'rituals'. I'm looking
for that 'eureka' moment, that revelation that when put into practice
will create this stream of fantastic and wonderful prose that emanates
from my brain, travels down my arms, into my fingers, where it is
skilfully and rapidly converted into text.
That's all rubbish of course. (or crubbish, as my daughter would say). I
forget who it was that said that the only way to write is to put in the
desk time. I paraphrase, badly. I'm so lazy, I can't be bothered to fire
up firefox, and go have a google to find out who the quote came from,
and actually quote it correctly. My only defence is, that if I fire up
firefox, I will be drawn inexorably into facebook, or twitter, or some
such other distraction. How many times a day can I hit refresh on the
BBC news website. Surely the world isn't going to end without me knowing
about it ?
So. To try and break the pattern. I am not staying at home. I am not
going away. I am going on a writing holiday, but not one of those ones
that cost you loads of money to go sit in some beautiful countryside
with a load of other people that also don't know how to write. (I have
no idea that's what those things are like, I've never been on one..
perhaps I should... but I'm too tight to do it. Too tight, and too
cynical. I digress). I mean I am going on holiday into the spare room.
I type this from my bed, and like the bed you sleep in on holiday, it's
unfamiliar to me. I've never slept in it before. I don't use this room a
lot, and infact, have never stayed in it. Even though, I am still in the
same flat, everything sounds different. The amount of darkness outside
the window is different. It's strange enough to me to not be
comfortable.
It's just that its cheaper than actually going away for the week. I have
my trusty netbook, my office chair (I wouldn't normally take that on
holiday somewhere with me, that would be wildly impractical). Wow, I'm
using up my whole years' quota of parenthesis in this entry. And I only
wanted to say a few short words. I don't know how many words this is,
because I'm on my netbook, and there is a limit to what it can be called
upon to do.
I am actually going to still get up in the mornings, just hopefully much
earlier than I have on previous 'stay at home' holidays. Sometimes I
haven't dragged myself out of bed much before midday.
This all does beg the question, how the hell do you continue to motivate
yourself to get up every day, if you, well, don't have a reason to get
up. If you're unemployed, or a kept woman, kept man for that matter. (I
live in hope). It must actually be hard to do that, and not descend into
an absolutely apathetically lazy, self serving ever decreasing spiral of
diminishing effort and returns.
After all, there's 'Jeremy Kyle' to get up for. I'd count that as a
reason to stay in bed until well after it's over. There's always 'Loose
Women'. I do love loose women, as much as the next man. You can take
that more than one way. A bit like the..... never mind.
Anyhoo. I will be, not hopefully, but am certain that I will be making a
difference this week.
Considering I want to write, I have a strange emotional attachment to
the idea of writing, and the elation that I get when I complete
something. The idea of starting something, when there's a blank page in
my pad, a blank screen on the computer and a blank head from whence the
ideas should flow to fill all the above is actually quite daunting. 'The
trick is, to stare at a blank piece of paper until your head bleeds' - I
believe is another badly remembered and uncredited quote. Uncredited
here. It is actually credited to someone. I just can't remember who.
When I'm actually in the throws of working out how to get a
character/story from plot/place/situation A to plot/place/situation B, I
don't think of the writing, I'm thinking of the problem at hand, which
is to get from A to B. Much in the same way you would think about
finding a route through a city you know, when you have the map memorised
in your head.
Like that, except, with this, you get to decide not just the route, but
also the layout of the city, the design of the buildings, the reason for
the journey and indeed the destination. Because there are so many
variables, and it's such an open field, its sometimes (I find) difficult
to know where to start.
Well, as Mary Poppins said, 'lets start at the very beginning, what a
very nice place to start'. Let's not confuse things by saying that when
writing you don't have to start at the beginning at all. That's just
going to get confusing, isn't it ? After all, even if you start at the
middle, it's still the start isn't it ?