Dear people in the library who talk on mobile phones while other people are trying to write scripts,

Who do you think you're fooling when you rush from your desk and speak in a low murmur for as long as your heart desires in the book stacks?

The books stacks are not your refuge! The book stacks are privately furious. The book stacks are giving you stink eye , you low-murmuring, long-talking selfish bastards.

I am very good friends with the book stacks, and I respect them as independent persons within their own rights. I can tell from the way the book stacks are shaking with a hitherto unexpressed fury that the book stacks may at any moment dislodge themselves from their foundations and conspire one day to crush your very important phone conversation beneath their lofty, learned, perfectly quiet shelves.

Be very careful. The books and I do not like you very much at all.

PS there is a foyer and there is a bathroom and there is an entire world outside and also there is a button called OFF.

Yes, I am getting older. Shut up.

So the guy in the State Library cafe pointed out that I hadn't put an "e" on the end of "carnivore" when I was doing the nine letter word in the newspaper this week.

The fact that I had come anywhere near getting the nine letter word was very exciting to me, and I had in fact been hoping that somebody would notice.

Which of course made me about ten times more embarrassed when he pointed out that there was a letter missing and it was, in fact, an eight letter word.

There is something metaphorical about this. At the moment I have a few huge tasks, no idea whether I'll finish them, and a propensity to forget the final detail that everyone notices I've forgotten.

Or something. I don't know. All I do know is that I keep wanting to tell the guy in the State Library cafe that I'm actually very good with words. Honestly. Or, should I say, honestl.

So we finally finished our auditions last night. How is it that there are so many good performers in Australia and hardly any of them are on TV?

Auditions are so hard. So many people, so many different combinations, far too many frustrating circular discussions that go for hours longer than they should. My head, even more than usual, is totally ready to explode.

Which it will have to do in the State Library.

See you guys later.

I am so completely exhausted.

Rita and I were talking about how the audition process this time has been like the colour grading process in our short film.

How is casting a play like adjusting the colours in a film, you ask?

Fascinating question. Let me tell you:

When you do a colour grade, you lock yourself in a dark room and look at the same thing over and over, done in lots of different ways. When you emerge from your little dark room, you look at the world in terms of its colours. You think to yourself, "Isn't it interesting what they've done with the sky colour today?" and you sit in the train thinking, "That poor woman's skin tones are all out of whack".

When you come out of an audition, you're auditioning everyone. You're thinking, "Interesting choice the waitress made with her inflection at the end there." You're looking at people having arguments and you're thinking maybe they could use their hands less. You're thinking it's a pity that person doesn't project her voice a little more because you can't hear her but her performance is otherwise quite lovely.

It's maddening, it's exciting, and it's completely exhausting. I'm going to bed and it's not even four in the morning.

Just a quick note: wankers who cast plays always say that auditions are hard because everyone who auditioned is really good and it's very difficult to make the decision. I used to think this was rubbish because surely someone was crap, but I have to say, if you have any idea how much we agonise and discuss and redraft and reconsider, and how annoyingly clever everyone is at being hilarious and sensitive and interesting in their own special unique and interesting way, your head would explode.

I know mine is.

I've been sent an email this week by several people about a playwright competition. I get emails like it all through the year, because I sign up to lists and because people are nice and think it would be good if I entered. I don't think I'd win, even I could enter. But I can't enter.

Competitions mean something in the theatre world. If you win a competition, sometimes it's the only exposure you get. That, and reviews. But a surefire way of getting reviews is by winning a playwright award for "excellence in Australian writing" or for "innovation in theatre" for addressing "issues of concern to Australia" etc. It's all a bit nauseating, but that's how it works.

The prizes are apparently offered to playwrights out of an interest in promoting excellence in Australian writing and revealing interesting things about our national psyche.

Let me be the first to say: what a load of crap.

In order to enter a script in a competition, you have to have done the following with it:

nothing

So, if you have produced the play yourself (because you don't like the idea of your script sitting around in a bottom drawer until someone else discovers it), you're not allowed to enter a script competition.

If you have allowed somebody else to produce the script, whether for stage or radio or in fact reproducing it in any way, you're not allowed to enter a script competition.

If you have agreed to one day in the future possibly allow someone else to produce the play, you're not allowed to enter a competition.

If you have entered the play in another competition, you're not allowed to enter.

So basically, you have to write your play for the competition. You have to submit it months in advance and you have to wait. You aren't allowed to enter it in anything else and you aren't allowed to put it on at the local scout hall.

This is because playwright competitions and funding bodies want to fund interesting and clever Australian pieces that hold a mirror up to society.

Or not.

Maybe it's because they want exclusive rights to put the play on first. I dunno. Just a wild guess.

I've been talking to some writer friends of mine. People who actually do write things that "hold up a mirror to Australia's psyche" and I think they should be able to enter competitions. Under the current rules, Shakespeare would be barred. Yes, I did just compare my friends and myself to Shakespeare. It's one in the morning on a Saturday and I'm getting worked up. I apologise. It won't happen again.

Hey so check this out.

It's our new show. Well, it's the image from our new show. It's Paris Hilton reading a book. Yes. Paris. Hilton. Book.

It is a real photograph, but methinks it was an ironic photoshoot (unless she is actually enjoying The Art of War, which I can only hope she is).

Anyway, now it's a Warhol. Shut up, it's seamless.

Meanwhile, in other news, we had our first auditions last night and I'm having my usual trouble. Everyone's ace. When they do auditions in Australian Idol, there are hopeless losers and talentless dorks streaming in from down the hall from an apparent bottomless pit. Where are those people? Why don't those people come? At least it would allow me some time to tune out.

Anyhoo.... I'm going in to the library now. There's a script I should probably write.

So I've been working seven days a week lately and I've been thinking it ain't so bad.
Quite a good way to spend your time, actually, because you get to see people in your scheduled "breaks" between writing/organising/meeting Rita and drawing up plans for auditions.

Then, this arvo, like a truck, it hit me. I collapsed into a dream-addled sleep on my bed in the middle of the day. My phone rang, the washing machine whirred, the ABC radio news shouted at me from the stereo. I floated semi conscious above all of it. I'm exhausted. You see, I had been taking it a bit easy, because of auditions tonight, but it's that fact that I'm taking things easy that my body has seized upon and now I am yawning and staring into the middle distance and losing focus and falling into five minute non-power-naps without even noticing.

I did not schedule this in. Somebody get me a coffee. Or twelve.