Things Writers Like

- Eavesdropping (someone wearing headphones near your interesting conversation? If that person is a writer, there is a 98% chance the ipod is on pause).

- Book launches (free food, free drink, someone reads a section of the book so you never have to read it but can opine with authority).

- Describing the act of searching "funny animals" on youtube as not only research but a tax deduction.

- Hearing about other people's day jobs (you did WHAT for eleven hours? They told you off for wearing WHAT? etc).

Things Writers Do Not Like

- The fact that other people get paid actual money for their day jobs (you did WHAT for eleven hours? They paid you HOW MUCH?)

- Dreadful television shows made with public money and used as an argument for importing ready-made TV programs from overseas.

- The fact that membership of the Australian Writers' Guild, which is apparently designed to support Australian writers at all stages of their careers, costs more than a second-hand laptop, a freelance paycheque, or, you know, searching the internet for tax-deductable funny animals for two months.

- People who think any word ending in a vowel must have an apostrophe insterted between the vowel and the letter 'S' in the event of the word being plural. Hence tomato's.

Tomato is, says the writer. Tomato is what?

Then the writer realises that sometimes, there is another thing the writer doesn't like:

- The writer does not like the writer.

This only happens briefly and is usually solved by going outside and eavesdropping. Hence:

Workman 1 to woman walking down street: Oop. Sorry.

Woman: No, you're right.

Workman 1: No, no, after you. Beauty before... what are we?

Workman 2: Brawn.

Workman 1: Feckin brawn. Beauty before brawn.

See? Everything's better after those little moments.

They say a red sky in the morning is a shepherd's warning. Red sky at night is shepherd's delight.

What about the writers?

Sometimes we like the rain. Sometimes we like to go outside in the sunshine. Most of us are against global warming.

Why don't we have portents assigned to us?

Dear The State Library of Victoria,

I heart you.

I heart your new slapdash cafe that you've thrown together in what was essentially the locker room. I heart that it's cheap and unpretentious and doesn't sell anything "on a bed of lettuce" or "drizzled in oil". I heart that it sells nutella and banana sandwiches and can all be packed away at the end of the day as if it wasn't there in the first place.

I heart that there were two girls eating their own food out of a lunchbox (they were sharing) in your little locker room cafe and you didn't go and arrest them or anything.

I heart that there is still a posh cafe and bar next door where you have to go if you're after a chai or a beer or something drizzled in something else.

I heart the boys who work there and I particularly heart the girl who works there who always looks like she's had a massive night out but she could probably surf a wave or run a marathon if you just gave her the right sort of lycra.

I heart the new system that discriminates against people who make noise by subdividing everyone into categories.

I heart that one of the quiet rooms is the arts room.

I heart that the arts room obviously used to be the outside bit of the library and there is an enormous downpipe that makes a racket when it's raining.

I heart the queue for the free internet that includes a sign at the front of it saying there are more free internet computers in the back room. I heart this particularly because the back room is always virtually empty whereas people in the free internet queue in the front room are confronting internet users for "CLEARLY HAVING BEEN HERE FOR SEVENTEEN MINUTES".

I heart the chess room. Chess!

I even heart your ridiculously early closing time on a Friday night because I am obliged to go outside and experience other people, and dinner, and drinks, and this means my primary experience of the outside world does not consist of a downpipe belting out a banjo-like arythmic overture to the quiet arts room, and me.

It's good to be back.

Rita, Stewart and I are the three central members of Standing There Productions. This means we meet regularly, drink tea, argue over the layout and tardiness of meeting minutes, and have ideas about what Standing There Productions wants to do next.

We have quite a bit of trouble explaining to other people exactly what it is we all do. I write things, that much is clear. But then, so does Rita (see The Receptionist for example, although there is more where that came from and in fact she has won script awards and has directed things and has a cameo or twelve in I Could Be Anybody). Also, I direct things like our comedy festival show this year, none of which I do without the help of Rita as casting co-director and Stew, whose withering gaze is cast over all things visual, and who also takes all our photos and does all our technical work.

To confuse things further, we met Stew when he performed in our play, People Watching in 2003. He has, as he delights in reminding me, never been on stage since. Even that isn't quite true because Stew stage-manages most of our projects. Rita handles the financial direction of the company, with Stewart and I asking her once a week to tell us what the budget means, and she generally has her ear to the ground and knows about funding opportunities which I completely fail to write proposals for.

What I think all this means is that we are all, according to a loose definition, producers. Or maybe Rita is our executive producer and we are all producers with various different roles. The problem with any of these definitions is that nobody knows what any of them mean.

For example. Please tell me what any of these mean (thanks to Wikipedia for your enlightening descriptions):

A film producer, or filmmaker, is a person who creates the conditions for making movies.

The primary role of a television producer is to coordinate and control all aspects of production.

A theatrical producer is the person ultimately responsible for overseeing all aspects of mounting a theatre production.  

According to these descriptions, a producer is a control freak who does everything. Ergo, I suspect we are all producers, in some way or another. Having said that, the definition "control freak who does everything" is perhaps too broad, because if this is the case, the following people are also producers:

1. My grandma

2. The woman at the Smith Street post office

3. The Australian Prime Minister

In fact, that's not a bad point. You'd be mad not to give my grandma funding. I might give her a call.

It's been a while since I've discussed the joys of reading Anthony Lane, film reviewer of The New Yorker, but having suffered painfully through the Spew and the City movie the other night (It was that or walk through the rain - I should have walked through the rain) I cannot recommend him highly enough. Here he is: Lane Review. Enjoy.

So I've been missing because I've been doing law-talking work to pay the bills. This means I haven't been writing and I haven't been producing or organising. What I have been doing is enjoying coffee in Wangaratta overlooking the river while talking about community development with people who know things I never thought I would find out so long as I lived.

Huzzah!

Back to real life in a minute.

Okay, so given I went to the Sydney Writers' Festival and plan to claim it as a tax deduction, I might as well spread the love. Right? Right. And as Katie C points out in the comments below, perhaps going blonde because you had a dream about it isn't the best way to move forward, necessarily. So. Here are some Sydney Writers' Festival Major Points I Won't Be Forgetting:

1. The Sydney Writers' Festival is not as much fun without my old friend and Standing There Captain of Industry Melanie Howlett standing in the sun with me waiting in line to see someone we both decided sounded maybe interesting but we were actually also deep in conversation about a mutual friend/wild plan to move away to Paris/the possibility of winning a Pulitzer even if you've never written anything apart from a fine selection of amusing emails. By the way, it should be noted that one of us has since moved to Paris and the other of us has still not written anything remotely approaching a novel, unless you include the facebook chats and gtalks.

2. Nothwithstanding point #1, the Sydney Writers' Festival is still an excellent event, although this year it seemed less exciting and perhaps less well attended, although I can't put my finger on why. The best part, for me, was the fact that I was staying about ninety seconds' walk from the main venues at Walsh Bay in a very cheap hotel with free breakfast and an endless supply of apples, which I ate almost constantly in a Lord of the Flies style survival technique due to the fact that on the day I left Melbourne my car was broken into and I had no money and had to live for two days on twenty-eight dollars. Hang on. That wasn't the best bit. The best bit was that I was staying close to Walsh Bay, by myself, and walking in to the first session in the morning and staying until the last session in the evening (usually a book launch involving free food and drink, which helped make the Lord of the Flies thing a little more Bridget Jones talking to Rushdie or similar). So, there I was, walking in for a day full of head-expanding learnings and I had no one else to talk to but myself. Despite missing Melanie, and being very pleased when Stew joined me on the weekend, I suspect I needed a bit of lonely contemplation after the madness of collaboration and performance that is the comedy festival. That was the best bit. Get it? Good.

3. Here's how the festival works in Sydney: you turn up, you look through the program of events and you go to those sessions that:

a) interest you because of an author

b) interest you because of a topic

c) interest you because it's something you've thought a lot about

d) interest you because you've never thought about it or are blindingly ignorant about it (eg in my case the science sessions, which usually have me stumbling out an hour later thinking things like "Wow - there are other galaxies! Who knew!" etc).

Most sessions are free, which requires lining up so you can get a seat. The sessions that aren't free are usually ten or twentysomething bucks. The free sessions are rarely disappointing, but if you know how to author-shop, you can spend your money very wisely indeed. Jeanette Winterson, for example, when you think about how much you pay for a Laurie Anderson gig, is clearly worth the price of admission and then some. Her presentation was astonishing. Writers these days have to be performers if they're going to do well out of book tours and festivals and I'd be fairly confident in predicting that every single person in that audience that day bought themselves at least one copy of one or more of her books. Which means that the low price of the tickets themselves must be beneficial to the author, as well as to the frenzied, cross and exhausted bookseller who is crouched in the foyer snapping "We don't do receipts I'm sorry" and barking at madam to please feel free to take a complimentary book bag on her way to the book signing.

Jeanette Winterson was brought up preaching The Word Of The Lord to strangers with her evangelical adoptive mother, Mrs Winterson, as she calls her. As a result, she says she is much better discussing huge topics with huge groups of people asking her curly questions (as she did in the session I saw) than she is one-on-one, when she can't look people in the eye and is diffident and weird (her description, not mine. I was so star-struck and in love that I'm afraid I was the stumbling idiot when it came to swapping small talk at the book signing. Also I was slightly distracted by a woman in crutches who had sat herself down next to Winterson at the signing table and was insisting on showing her a selection of her photographs while her dog licked Winterson's face ).

4. I enjoyed the launch and author's reading from a book called Poking Seaweed With A Stick And Running Away From The Smell, which I have since read and enjoyed possibly even more than I would have already due to having the author's voice in my head. I am of the opion that authors should do spoken word recordings of their books more often. It is a brilliant way to get to know an author's work. Anne Enright, who read a short story called Until The Girl Died from her recent short story collection Taking Pictures and whose Booker Prize-winning novel The Gathering I accidentally bought on the way home yesterday and am currently reading, has the most beautiful reading voice and style and I hope I don't forget how to read with it in my head as I get further into The Gathering.

5. There were many other sessions of interest but these were the highlights. I enjoyed a session on the Vietnam War that was populated by an audience of veterans making heart-stopping speeches about their experiences. I was fascinated by a session on writing about grief in which two brilliant women discussed their personal experiences, their writing, and made a few hilarious observations about dogs and middle age that made me think that writing is one area in which brilliant women can do what they like, unhindered by weird perceptions they might come up against if they were on telly, or standing on a stage. They were funny as hell and clever and prickly and opinionated and I was inspired by them, and by many others. Doug, who script edited our kids' TV script that remains in development (I hate that phrase. Might as well call it Limbo) was on a very interesting and very funny panel discussing writing for young adults, including a pearl of wisdom from Doug on using young people's language. Don't ever use the word random, he cautioned. High. Larious.

Anyway that's all I can manage, due to this becoming the novel I should by rights be winning my Pulitzer for. Hopefully more thoughts from the writers' festival will sift through the other more solid matter in my brain (phone numbers, what's for lunch etc) and I will expound more wisdom here. In the meantime, I have put aside the portentious dream of me being blonde and I plan to continue as a messy-haired brunette shambles, writing from the newly revived State Library (I barely recognise the place) and heading on towards a future of uncertain dimensions with the same head I've always had. Conventional of me, I know. But someone's got to be sensible around here.