On raspberry ripple...

M is busy redrafting her play, the performance of which takes place in August. Unable to do anything other than be an annoying presence - I opted to fix a mirror to the wall in the room in which she is writing, and then set about re-fitting a lamp shade and generally DIYing in the near vicinity - I eventually kept out of the way, busying myself completing the quite fantastic I, Fatty before setting about Douglas Coupland's new book JPod, watching Do Not Adjust Your Set and burning a few CDs. Oh aye, and I watched England progress to the quarters, accompanied by some Carling Black Label and raspberry ripple ice cream. I've got four things I could be writing, or at least working on, but with no pressing deadlines it seems, at the moment, a bit pointless. Better, and more rewarding, for instance, to wash pots and sweep up cat litter than work on the plot of a play. No doubt once M comes out of solitary confinement it will be time for me to go back into it and we can reverse our roles again. Heaven forbid the day when we're both working on something at the same time. M is writing to some rather bizarre jazz music nonsense, blasting out from Radio 2. It's got lyrics, which would never work for me as I would end up putting those lyrics into the mouths of my characters when I couldn't think of my own gibberish. This blog has made a guest appearance over at the Humber Mouth, which is rather nice now I've almost vanished into the obscurity and anonymity that isn't working at a newspaper. This coming week I hope to get myself motivated - drawing up some kind of plan to get these writing projects off the mark, sorting out financial matters and generally getting up earlier. I shall start - and here the plan already starts to falter and have nothing to do with writing - by attacking a big pile of cardboard that lives in our rear garden. I aim to set it alight at the exact moment that M is being interviewed for a magazine, in her full view. Not to put her off, or anything, of course.