If You Justify This, Your Talent Will Be Next

The boy’s at Download and the girl’s with her Dad for the weekend. I have a quiet house and uninterrupted access to the computer. All week I have looked forward to this writing time, stretching out in front of me, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, three glorious writing days…

I need to watch CSI:NY, of course. At the end of the programme, just like at the end of The Mentalist, there is a competition to win five thousand pounds, just by texting A,B or C to somewhere or other. Only you have to have watched the thing to know the answer. With a son about to start drama school and a daughter who only has to wear something once to grow out of it, I need all the help I can get. Over the weekend I also need to watch Bremner, Bird and Fortune and Have I Got News For You, just to find out what’s really happening in the world, and I have to watch Robin Hood, to have something to talk about with my daughter. And for fifty odd minutes of Richard Armitage in leather.

I have to listen to Sounds of the Sixties on Radio 2 on Saturday morning because it cheers me up for the rest of the weekend, and this week I have to listen to Jonathan Ross because Alice Cooper’s on. I need to read The Saturday Guardian from cover to cover, natch, because I need to be Informed, and also the more I read the different sections the more likely I am one day to have an article accepted…and likewise the local paper.

I need to go on ABC Tales and review a few pieces, not because I enjoy it - Heaven Forbid - but because unless you critique you can’t expect to be critiqued, and you learn a lot from reading other people’s work. I need to scan the Writer’s Markets site I subscribe to, and I need to check my emails, to see if any of those markets have got back to me, and I need to check my bank account on-line, to see if I really do have to resort to writing other people’s essays (sorry, providing model or sample essays) or going on the sex chat lines (work from home, ten quid an hour, half an hour’s training and script provided, the kids need never know…).

I’m doing a Presentation at work next Wednesday, so although I swore I wouldn’t work on it at home, I really should at least make sure that I have a vague notion of what’s going to be in it. I swore I wouldn’t practise ECDL at home as well, but with my job disappearing in the latest round of reorganisations, and redundancy a real possibility, I need to make sure I’m as employable as possible.

Oh look. It’s Monday. The boy will be back sometime today, and I’m meeting the girl after school to buy new dance shoes and leggings and knee pads (knee pads?? sodding Diversity have a lot to answer for). I’m back at work tomorrow so I need to wash my unofficial uniform of two pairs of black trousers and mix ‘n’ match tops (if it’s Thursday, it must be the green one). I need to go to Morrison’s to buy food for the returning hordes.

Still, look, I’ve written.