I have worked as a script editor before on a few things unofficially and a few things officially (including the upcoming ABC TV show The Librarians, which is running some very exciting looking promos at the moment by the way, and you should all watch it).

Being a script editor is so much fun because you can work objectively and then leave. You can see the problems, suggest possible new directions, scrap things you don't like, and then walk away from the rubble you have created while someone else does the work.

At least, that's how it felt from the perspective of BEING a script editor.

Now, for our children's TV script we're writing, we are working with our own script editor and I have realised something. A script editors is, quite simply, the best thing since sliced bread. Or indeed bread of any kind. The best thing since yeast.

You know that game where you have to say which permanent member of staff you would employ if you could - you know, most people say masseur or chef or butler or whatever?

Script editor. For sure. Not even a contest. Not even if the chef was Jamie Oliver and the masseur was Johnny Depp.

I'm sorry Johnny, that was a lovely audition, it really was, but you see I can only employ one staff member so I'm afraid you'll have to go. Do take one of Jamie's crab bisques on your way out won't you.

Poor Johnny. He never had a chance.

So. It begins.

I am officially working for Standing There Productions starting tomorrow. I went into work today, "real work" as I have been calling it for years, and told them I'd see them in December.

Yikes.

This had better be worth it.

As a writer, and as a human being, I am not a morning person.

Mornings for me have always been eerie, sickly, befuddling continents, shifting at about 10am into a new geography involving the tender preparation and cautious, careful consumption of earl grey tea.

People who get up in the morning are often people I admire, people I aspire to be more like. My grandfather, ex army, several hundred years old, gets up at the crack of dawn and marches through fields and villages, cities and towns, other dimensional realms etc returning in time for two pieces of charcoal covered in honey, and tea. My routine inherited only the tea. It seems to me that if only I could manage the getting up early part of the routine, I might also live to be a hundred, marching through fields and villages and getting my photograph in the local newspaper for riding a Harley Davidson motorbike at the age of ninety-one (seriously, check this out).

Among my peers, too, I am surrounded. Rita Walsh, Standing There producer (also my boss) gets up half an hour after she goes to bed, runs the Melbourne marathon because she "might as well give it a go”, and never forgets anything, with the notable exception of how long she has paid for parking. When we worked together in an office, years ago, I would turn up to work, stumble through the day and marvel at Rita’s machine-like efficiency. She was like Industrial Era Europe - all shiny pistons and fast-moving conveyor belts. At about three in the afternoon, however, Rits would drop like a marionette and I would emerge, hero-like, from a thick fog, finally ready to conquer all the things Rita hadn’t already done. This usually meant it was my job to get Rita a coffee, put the phones on voicemail, and go home.

The problem is though, Rita has adapted. Like a sea creature growing legs and striding up the shore towards a future splitting the atom and having opposable thumbs and so forth, Rita now works until quite late at night. I, on the other hand, remain back in the dark ages.

So this morning, we began Operation Make Lorin More Productive on Monday Mornings. It’s not a name we’ve run past our marketing and communications manager yet, but you get the idea. I need to write to schedule now. That means not at midnight.

I was outside, vertical, walking to a meeting with Rita, at seven thirty this morning. Things actually happen at that time. The sun hits a different part of your face. Old ladies - the same ones who would put doilies out when a guest was coming - stand outside in their front gardens frowning as they hose the geraniums, squinting at you in their puffy high-fire-danger dressing gowns, hair already in curlers. When I got to the meeting, I had to excuse myself and squeeze past a seagull who was scooping the top off a puddle of morning water with its orange beak.

It’s only taken a day, but I’m already a morning person.

When I got to the State Library, I was proud to be among the library nerds I usually curse who stand out the front like people queuing for grand final tickets, waiting for the library to open so they can go in and achieve more by midday than the rest of us would achieve in a week.

Yeah, I’m one of those guys now. You just watch.

Now, I know this is supposed to be the "Standing There Productions Diary", about writing and filming and artists residencies (see below) and producing theatre shows and applying for funding and wishing there was more money for the arts and so on. I realise I'm not supposed to be writing here about anything that might be perceived as political, because politics is boring and the free MX newspapers have it right when they put massacres and droughts and so on in a tiny column on the right hand side of page five, called Boring But Important.

But it's only in privileged countries like Australia that the link between writing and politics isn't tragically obvious. You probably saw that in the past month in Burma, a Japanese journalist was shot dead in broad daylight, on camera. In Russia, probably the two most high profile anti-government journalists have been mysteriously murdered, one of them drinking a cup of poisoned tea in London, one of them shot in the lift to her apartment a year ago on Sunday (eerily also President Vladamir Putin's birthday).

Also, if you think it's only boring political writers who get in trouble, and that people like me who write shows for the comedy festival are taking ourselves a bit too seriously by aligning ourselves with the likes of those above, consider this guy, a comedian in Burma who has been arrested - which means there are grave concerns for his safety - for supporting a peaceful protest held by monks. He wasn't performing his work because he is not allowed to.

If you want to find out more about these writers and many more, go here.

Here's what I think. I'll keep it short. Boring But Important.

The Australian Immigration Minister, Kevin Andrews, he's the guy with the ears and the persecuted and simultaneously self-righteous face, has said that he has information on how "Africans" (it's a pretty big place) aren't fitting into Australian communities. He isn't going to show us that information or tell us exactly where he got it. He just has it. Trust him.

So, if he can't show us the information he has been given, can he tell us about it in a vague and frightening way? NO WORRIES!

Concerns exist, according to Kevin, in these areas: gangs are forming, altercations are occurring at nightclubs, conflicts are happening within families, young men are drinking in parks, and organisations are arguing about who receives favoured treatment. You know what that sounds like to me? Sounds like Australian sport.

Gangs are forming (much like they did - whatever version of the facts you believe - in this NRL incident we all remember). Altercations are happening at nightclubs (let's see, try here, here, here, and here), conflicts within families (erm, here we go), young men drinking beer in parks (hmmm, lemme see - oh and there's this of course).

So, yes, those Africans really are behaving badly, aren't they. All of this was raised after an Sudanese boy was beaten to death by a couple of (apparently not African) boys.

The problem is, with a country like ours where you're allowed to say what you like, that people in power can say (or refuse to say) what they like, too. It's a shame the only thing we have to go on here is insinuation and rumour.

What I can say is that it's just SUCH a good thing the opposition is doing such a great job OPPOSING the government's stance on things like:

- Health (Rudd was questioned about the similar opposition/government health plans. His retort? Great minds think alike).

- The pulp mill (opposition supports it)

- Immigration (opposition agrees with government)

- The citizenship test (opposition agrees with government)

It's a shame that having a robust democracy where you can say what you think doesn't mean that anyone in a position of power anywhere has any vision whatsoever.

Boring but important, guys. Boring but important.

I have always thought it would be nice to be an "artist in residence", if only because it might make me feel slightly more legitimate in applying for my Melbourne Festival Artist Pass, but also because it sounds romantic.

Which is why it is particularly delightful that Standing There Productions has been granted a residency at Australian artists Arthur and Yvonne Boyd's property, Bundanon (which you can see here) in New South Wales, for a month yet to be determined in 2008.

We're pretty excited about having, as Virginia Woolf would say, a room of our own. Bundanon has provided inspiration for many Australian artists since the Boyds, who believed that "nobody should own a landscape" and therefore donated their property to Australian artists for the rest of time.

How cool is that? Pretty cool cats, dem Boyds, as it turns out.

Although... living for a month in a peaceful and inspiring landscape will be a challenge. Suddenly I'll be having nobody to blame but myself, and possibly Rita and Stew.

Which is fine. They totally had it coming.

PS. Proof that one woman's heaven is another's hell: I told my housemate about the residency and she said, patiently, wanting to understand, "So, it's kind of like... jail?"

Hm. Kind of. In a good way. A jail with a view.

I am on antibiotics. I don't really understand antibiotics. That is to say, when someone explains it to me, I kind of follow what they're saying, but it's like when people explain aeroplanes and underwater tunnels - it just leaves me thinking, "Well I suppose that makes sense, since clearly there are aeroplanes in the sky and tunnels underwater, but..."

Let's just say I wouldn't be surprised if (like the Y2K bug) it all turned out to be rubbish.

Not that I'm dissing it. Not really. I just think of these things as 'magic'. Hopefully, magic that will be complete by Thursday. Deadlines wait for nobody.

Today, I am feeling poorly.

I have, karma-style, brought this on myself by pointing and laughing at my beloved, who contracted an illness called "croup", usually only contracted by babies. Although it is true that he is a lot younger than I am, he is not THAT much younger than I am, so I was finding it amusing that he had a sickness reserved, appropriately, for infants. Was he also suffering nappy rash? Did he want his dummy? etc. Hilarious.

Then, I started sneezing and coughing, wanting to tear out my burning tonsils, attempting to throw off a rampant fever, and desiring simply to lie down until the winds of time swept me into another dimension. Not so hilarious, as it turns out. More hideous, really, than hilarious, when you think about it. Still, there is some conjecture over whether or not I have the same illness as my manfriend (let's call him Babyface) which thus renders croup hilarious again, since hilarity is, as we all know from Australia's Funniest Home Videos, in the eye of the beholder.

If anyone out there has ever tried to write while suffering from a fever, you will know that it is quite a bizarre state to create anything in (apart from, frankly, mucus). I often try to write or plan creative projects when I'm lying in bed with a fever because, not being a drug taker, I rarely get the opportunity to read over my own writing later and think, "What the hell was I thinking? Who wrote this? I don't remember writing this. I don't remember anything! You guys! Are you having me on?" etc. It really is quite loopy what goes through your fevered mind.

Now I want to read this book, but the problem with being sick is that as soon as you're not sick any more, it's the most boring topic on earth.

In fact, clinical tests prove that the five most boring things on earth to discuss are:

Illness (unless it's fantastic like the girl whose spider bite turned out to be a nest of baby spiders on her face)

Other people's dreams (fascinating to you, boring to everyone else)

Stories about pets (I refer here to stories that do not have plots - the mere fact that an animal is in the story somehow meaning that the story can be about how an animal exists, wags its tail, has fussy eating habits, sleeps, has a name etc. Animal stories are only interesting if your animal has saved somebody's life, played an instrument, been involved in a crime of some sort, or (like the lizard in the newspaper recently) eaten a toy version of itself and then excreted it, causing its child owner to exclaim that it is having a baby out of its bottom).

Office procedures (Apparently, discussions relating to the most appropriate method of filing or archiving are always long, no matter who you work for, and they usually involve two very opinionated polar opposite positions, about neither of which anybody else cares).

and

Traffic (As much as it might pain you at the time, someone overtaking you from the inside lane will bore the pants off someone at the barbecue you arrive late at. Unless you actually have an accident, become involved in fisticuffs, or accidentally flick the bird at mother theresa, it's boring. It just is.)

Do you know how I know this? Because I worked on the phones at a radio station. Do you know the top two topics people want to talk about on talkback radio? Traffic, and pets. Dreams comes in at number three, closely followed by children, sob stories (illness comes in here, so does debt) and weather. The only one of these that doesn't make it onto talkback radio is office procedures.

Maybe I should start my own show.