Block Chop 74: Writing, TV and Beer.

Writing in the morning is much harder than at night.  The urgency just isn’t there.  At night it’s dark, and acceptable to have a glass of wine or beer or, if I’m feeling especially writerly, a glass of whisky; both conducive to the act of writing.  Also there is more likely to be an impending deadline.  It might be the next morning, or if it’s this blog, the deadline will be when I finally fall asleep.

But before lunch time there is always the temptation to keep putting it off with cups of tea, and walks to the shops, and watching Monk on channel Quest at 2pm, and doing the washing up, and eating a sandwich, and having a ‘quick’ go on Civilization IV (...just one more turn...), and sitting on the toilet with a book, and all the other pointless daily tasks.  I don’t need to write this now; I can leave it until later.  This of course entirely defeats the purpose – to encourage writing to start early on in the day, and continue until tea time.

Also sitting up in bed with a large dusty laptop with a loudly overworking fan, at 1am, isn’t exactly conducive to comfort, and the smooth transition of non-platonic relations, if you know what I mean, wink wink nudge nudge, a nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat.  Have you seen that advert on TV for some sort of furniture shop?  It has a bed with a hidden flat screen TV in the foot.  When you press a button the TV rises up from its hiding place, drawing all attention toward it and away from your bed partner.  Who doesn’t want a massive TV in their bed; but there’s no doubt it would be nigh on impossible for physical intimacy to occur in its noisy, glowing LCD presence.

How quickly my mind moves from writing to trivialities, even when I am actually writing.  I began this post by discussing writing, and almost immediately move on to whining about TV.  Today needs to stay a writing day.  I have a short story I am working on that needs a decent amount of headway achieving, and I need to put some more work towards my debut month as Fiction Editor for Blank Pages magazine.  The editorial meeting is this evening, and I had better have something to say (I will do).  It certainly wouldn’t do to turn up and nervously mumble an introduction, ‘My name is Kev-Kevin B-B-Bradshaw; I do draw and make words’, before making weak excuses about my under-prepared contributions.  No it wouldn’t.

Announcement

Market researcher

I’ve just applied to be part of an interesting piece of market research.  If I am chosen, on Monday 11^th October, at about 7pm, a market researcher will come around to my house with lots of beer.  I am to invite three male friends who will be paid £15 each.  The session lasts two hours, and our job is to drink the beer, and tell the market researcher what we think.  If you want to be one of the three lucky male friends, then send me a message on facebook, or phone/txt me.  (I don’t know if I have been chosen yet, but I’ll mention it here if I do get picked.)

Glossary

Beer – Beer is the world’s most popular, and oldest, alcoholic drink.  If you have never tried it before I thoroughly recommend you do.