When I first started working for a production company (I was a glorified secretary at the time) I was taught about the central tension in all production companies between development and production. You’re either developing a project (writing it, in my case) or producing it (filming it, directing it for stage etc). I was told production is always better. The aim is to constantly be in production. Why? Because developing projects means you’re poor and you’re boring.

WHO WANTS TO BE POOR AND BORING?

Sure, being ONE of those things might be okay, but BOTH? But it’s true. If you spend your whole time developing stuff (for little or no money) then everyone gets sick of hearing what you’re going to do, and how little money you have to do it. Or, to bring it back to me (always) if you spend your whole time writing, people think you’re biding time in between your “real” projects (ie the stuff they see on stage/screen) and they think it’s very boring of you to go home and write your imaginary thing that doesn’t exist yet.

The mistake some people make is to tip the balance too far the other way and go into production with a not very good idea they haven’t thought about at all which means that they’re exciting, well-paid, and memorably shithouse. This of course says a lot about how arts funding works, but old Pandora should be left out of this for the moment.

THE POINT IS (yes please) that when I’m working on development, rather than production, I am THE most boring woman on earth. I don’t see anyone, I don’t go anywhere, I just sit in a room and write and then once a week I have a production meeting with Rits and Stew WHO ARE MY ONLY FRIENDS. I have a coffee from the same place each day and sometimes, AS A TREAT, I buy flavoured mineral water. FLAVOURED MINERAL WATER. TREAT. If I ever go anywhere, I’m late because I was in the middle of something. I am always “nearly finished”. I am always “coming in a tic”. Stew, whose job title at Standing There Productions (production coordinator) has never fully encompassed what he does, has gone ahead and suggested a title for himself: Head Waiter.

It is the devastating accuracy of the title that wounds me so.

I’m sorry, friends and family. I will totally make up for it when we’re in production. You watch me go.

*gets mystery illness*

So if you want to look important in a meeting because you're trying to convince a reality TV crew not to shoot outside in the laneway you're holding a breakfast of 400 people in...

Get your friend to bring a takeaway cup of coffee into the room and nod shyly at you, like unto an important CEO type person.

Works a charm.

I've heard.

(As you can see, day job going well. Writing... well... Happy Australia Day!).

I hate to repeat myself but you WOULDN'T BELIEVE how many deadlines I've got.

Cop this:

- Organising a VIP breakfast for 400 people in the street on Wednesday next week. The caterers dropped out today.

- Writing a comedy festival script, auditions coming up very shortly

- Writing a script due on 31 Jan

- Writing a prose thing I was supposed to do "in January" which I am hoping meant "in February", and by February I am hoping they meant, kind of, March.

I promise I'll write something here that isn't about how I have no time and no money and too much to do. One day, I will write about sky and frisbees and swims and people riding bikes with bottles of wine and breadsticks in their handbaskets again.

Just not now.

Apparently, humans are social animals. Without social interaction, we become dysfunctional and can't survive. We go loopy and do crazy things like thinking we’re from planet Zorb and worshipping the god of an inanimate object such as a pedal bin, piece of rope, can opener or smiliar. Apparently this is true, which I know because I saw it in a documentary.

I also know it is true because lately I have been working weekends.

On Sunday, I made myself take an hour off to go and meet my friends who were at a BBQ for my mate Lawrence who is going to live in Sydney.

I went to the party and I couldn't do it right. I couldn't do small talk, I couldn't do large talk, I couldn't even do medium-sized talk (normally my specialty). I couldn't TALK without getting confused and realising I wasn't saying what I set out to say. I do believe at one stage I was speaking in tongues.

No wonder those people in the library are so insane.

Argem de minno frizzle mop. Don't you think?

When you picture someone writing, what do you picture?

A piece of paper and a pen, or a computer?

I used to picture the pen. I used to write with the pen. I used to write first, type later. Couldn’t do it any other way. These days, though, it’s straight into a blank word document, or I lose concentration and look out the window at the car being towed away opposite the cafe I go to. (At exactly 4pm every weekday, two parking ticket inspectors and a tow truck arrive at what was - at 3:59 - a car park but is now a clearway zone opposite the cafe. Parking ticket first; tow truck second; confused, disbelieving, furious motorist third. It’s a depressing regularity and the kind of thing one is likely to get an arts grant for filming in fast forward through a grainy camera with no sound and subtitles).

Sadly, my vision of a writer has clouded somewhat since I’ve attempted to be one. I don’t write things down, I don’t use a typewriter. I use a laptop, but not in the way I’d like to. I’m not like the writers in those pictures in American magazines that advertise the latest laptop: thoughtful, faintly amused writers in spectacles who wear white socks, resting on the laps of their clearly wealthy but inspiringly mixed-race families, while the fire burns away in the corner and the laptop is synched to the Blackberry which is synched to the office, where they have a job that requires them to write from home wearing white socks but also apparently keeps them in the life to which (just look at their kids) they have clearly become accustomed.

I never quite live up to the best parts of the corny picture people have of things. I live up to the worst: procrastinating on the internet, being antisocial, not having enough money to give anything the attention it deserves, and, you know, never going outside.

One day though, gadget. One day.

Well, at least the socks.