Playing hookey

I'm not supposed to be blogging right now. I should be doing my bookwork.

But it's a big ugly pile of bookwork, with bills to pay and forms to fill in and applications to make and payrolls to run. Agggh. Doesn't my inbox know that I'm really not in the mood?

But you can see my pile. If it could talk, it would not be using nice words.

So i'm going to do fifteen minutes pile and five minutes blog. That way both me and the pile will be happy (in theory).

Here goes (headphones on, I'm shuffling off to my bookwork - 8.42pm)

8.45pm:
Crikey banana! if my husband makes one more trip to Coles I'm going to cry! How many dockets can one man collect in his wallet?? And each one has to be entered seperately...aggggh!!

okay, roll back shoulders, put my pajamas on.

8.49pm - make note to tell husband not to take 'cash out' on company card. Does my head in.

right, back to work.

9.04pm: It ceased to be 2010 38 days ago. If I keep typing 2010 I shouldn't be surprised when the transactions appear in the 2010 reports and not 2011.

9.12pm Got sprung desk dancing to itunes. People should NOT sneak up behind you when they're supposed to be sleeping off a headcold in bed.

9.27PM - I love it when I go on an internal rant that some unfeeling person hasn't written the cheque details down on an invoice (meaning I have to go searching for them), only to find my writing on the cheque stub.

9.43pm - am being scouted by a mozzie. And I can't hear the little blighter because my headphones are too loud. Some idiot around here must have some stagnant water because they're just everywhere. I'm hoping the OFF! I liberally applied works.

9.50pm -- sad face. Still have big pile to go. I actually haven't even made it to my inbox yet, just working on random papers on my desk. Feel a bit sick.

Mozzie just dive-bombed me!! BRAZEN (also, coincidentally, the working title of my next book, LOL).


10.16PM - Why is it that the oldest stapler you have always works the best?

I'm slowing down now. The internet beckons...but really, I need to stop reading those parent forums that talk about how their 20-month-olds are talking in complete sentences, know their abc and are doing olympic worthy somersaults. Always makes me want to punch something.

ps - now have ten-cent-piece shaped bite from dive-bombing mozzie - he bit my **neck** the thieving little vampire! Because, you know, it's the one spot I don't have repellent.

10.44pm...i can't do any more...please send chocolate.

Not the sharpest tool

So, how long have we owned this cafe??
Since january, so that's ten months. So why in the name of God's green earth did I never put it together that:

a) i have always written well in cafes
b) i now have my own cafe and should perhaps, oh, i don't know -- WRITE IN IT!!

now, I understand that during the day there's work to do (and most nights too) and babies to play with and love and cherish, but after the cherub has gone to bed?

it finally clicked tonight, and i stole downstairs at 9pm armed with a wad of paper and three different coloured pens and voila - pages were written. Good pages too. Ideas flowing, characters talking ten to the dozen, asking me where I've been and what took me so long to get to their story.

Who knew?

Of course I had to do a little bit of work on my space. A lamp pulled out of storage, chairs placed in strategic positions to create a kind of cafe cave. But it works! I have FOUND MY PLACE. My days of wandering from the bed to the couch to my paperwork ridden desk are over!

I'm so happy for writer me.

And it's a slightly different process for this book. Entirely different process actually. I'm doing a month of prewriting rather than the usual feet first oh crap process. I'll let you know how it goes.

Tomorrow night I might even crank up the stereo! Lord above - it's a riot over here!

Congrats Elisa!

The results from the Golden Heart happened today and I send out a big congrats to my fellow Unsinkable Elisa Beatty.

She also won the Royal Ascot, go Elisa!

I'm looking forward to seeing her book on the shelves.

In the meantime, I find that even thousands of miles away, the excitement of RWA10 is contagious. Can't wait to get into my work and feel newly dedicated. Gotta love that!

Sweet Enough?

I was at Costco the other day, when a nifty little book caught my eye. Sweet Poison. Nice title. And about a subject close to my heart - sugar. About how our bodies use is, about how we eat waaaay to much for our bodies to cope with. This book might have been written for me. I lurve sugar.
To me it's comfort. It's birthday parties with home cooked sponge or mum's lemon delicious pudding. It's sitting in front of the fire with mum chatting until she said 'i wish there was something nice to eat', only to have dad bring out a block of peppermint cadbury he'd squirrelled away for just such an occasion. It's lopsided, chocolate soaked lamingtons in my lunchbox and fresh baked biscuits picked off the cooling tray.
When I'm sad I eat sweet things. When I'm angry I eat sweet things. When I'm bored...well you get the picture. It was my all-rounder medicine. Although, come to think of it, it never actually fixed any of those things.
I read Sweet Poison in a night, stayed up late with the lamp down by the side of the bed. Gulped it down like a cinnamon donut.
And have been sugar free ever since. Ten days. Not that I'm counting or anything.
Cold turkey. Because I'm pretty sure that if I don't do something soon, I'm going to have another spare tyre and type 2 diabetes. I don't like the sound of that. I also don't like feeling beholden to a condiment.
And I am beholden, pretty much all of the time.
I proved it in the first two days when I realised that if something didn't have sugar in it, I really wasn't interested in eating it. Coffee? I've discovered I don't particularly have the palate for it unless I can heap sugar into it.
Who knew?
Every day so far has been a battle. And it's only been a week.
But I have to do cold turkey, because I'm that kind of person. If I muddy the boundaries, I'll be back to muffins for breakfast and hot chocolate with marshmallows for morning tea in a split second.
I don't know what I'm going to do the first time I get angry, or bored or sad. Perhaps actually try to deal with it? Novel thought.

I can't say I've got heaps more energy. Yet, anyway. I can say I've already lost 3 kilos. I can say that my skin is soft and clear now. I can say that the second day migraine was a corker. I can say fruit never tasted so good and so fresh and lovely.
so send me good sugar-free thoughts, I need the green vibes to keep me going!

When Secondary Characters Attack

I was doing some revision tonight.
Well, to set the scene, I was sitting in Starbucks, drinking a hazelnut latte FAR TOO LATE in the evening, plus a cupcake, plus a krispy kreme (and I wonder why I can't lose weight?), with Gabrielle sitting across from me pretending to revise but probably reading Facebook...
...anyway, I was reading over my scene. It was an innocuous scene. My hero and his buddie were playing billiards having escaped the ballroom. The problem was, somewhere during the rewrite, the best buddie, Captain Cosgrove, suddenly got some killer lines and a bit too much personality.
Suddenly HE was backing my hero into a corner, analysing him, finding him wanting. Next thing I know, I'm laughing out loud at his witty repartie, his bravery, his intelligence.
OH NO!!! The dreaded 'secondary-character-who-leaps-off-the-page' syndrome.
Crap. Now I don't know what to do, or even if I have to do anything. Captain Cosgrove is whispering in my ear (after thoroughly trouncing my hero at billiards) that he should have his own book, that he's worthy.

But I've got news for you, Captain Cosgrove. Make the most of your five minutes in the sun because no matter how witty and lovely you are - YOU ARE NOT GETTING YOUR OWN BOOK. Your happily ever after comes in about three chapters, and that's the end of you!
Deal with it, you gorgeous thing.

A pocket full of time

I'm here.
I've come to the page.
It might be late, I might have had a crazy hectic day, but all that is done and I've finally arrived - dipping my hand into the small pocket of time I've found.

I ferret out these pockets most days with a stubborness that would surprise the me of two years ago, who could spend all Sunday in her pajamas.

Sometimes the pockets are ten minutes, sometimes fifty.
They encourage me not to sleep, or watch a rerun of the Vicar of Dibley, even though Dawn French always makes me laugh.

These little pockets are beautiful to me. A green oasis. A tropical island.

They are hard won and highly treasured.

They are most often before bedtime, when the demands of the day are truly done, and my man and my baby are fast asleep.

It's like that tonight. I'm sitting on the sofa, the lights out and a candle lit beside me. The swoosh of the dryer in the background is strangely soothing and it's just me and my laptop, throwing a stream of words into the quiet night.

I'm here.
I've come to the page.

Life by Brochure Drop

This week I've been delivering brochures. Hundreds of them, to any house that doesn't have a 'no junk mail' sticker on their letterbox. I find now, that although I had one of those stickers on my last mail box, courtesy of the Wilderness Society, now I am utterly offended by them.

Junk, you say? What is it about the menu to my cafe that is junky? It's not junky! it's gold, I tell you, pure GOLD! You should be so lucky to read about our ricotta pancakes with spiced apples, hazelnuts and honey labne. lol.

But nevertheless, I walk past those letterboxes, even though most of the time they look like the letterboxes of precisely the kind of customers I would love to have.

But I digress.

I've discovered that delivering brochures gives me extreme envy. I walk past the sweet little cottages with gardenias planted by the door and wonder what those people did to be so lucky to own such a lovely house. House after house, each charming in its own way. Until I discover the house that just makes my heart sink into my stomach I want to own it so badly.

True to form, it's old. Old and falling down. The weatherboards are severely weathered, the garden crazy and overgrown. And the icing on the cake -- it has a vintage phone booth perched in the front garden, overgrown by vines, waiting for a vintage superman to come along and change in it. And I wonder, yet again, who is lucky enough to own this house? what did they do? Who are they? I wonder if i knock on the door if they'll give me a cup of tea and tell me their life story for the price of a piece of junk mail.