I have not posted since Monday or something! Unforgivable! Have not been able to revel in my usual web surfing and the like as I have had work,work, work to do. Finally almost finished my weather report thing…I pray for it’s end every 30 minutes. Have been informed I am to go to Canberra next week for three days to do some bushfire research…this is kind of good and kind of scary. Haven’t been there before – though I have driven past the turnoff on the Hume Highway countless times – am staying by myself in a seedy hotel in the city. Hopefully not too seedsville – pray for the minibar – pray for the minibar. My boss is from Canberra so he’ll be staying with friends. I’m just going to have to talk the talk and wing it the best I can.

I’m going to be interviewing media people and also those connected with the animal shelters about their experiences; the sequence of events, warnings, what they consider to be the main issues arising out of it and stuff like that. Should be interesting, although I’m just wondering how the hell I’m going to get around as my boss gets the car – he’s going to be doing all the emergency workers and stuff. I think I’m going to be a taxi queen. What’s New Pussycat? is Canberra based so I have to assume that there are some un-scary people there. Actually most of the people I’ve called up and hassled have been very nice to me – only one wanker from a MOR commercial crud radio station used his ‘broadcast’ voice down the phone at me as he pontificated at unnecessary length.

Oh. Went to a writing group via a guy I know the other night and had my work savaged by five guys as I sat there biting my lip and swearing vengeance. I’d only met one of them before – they’d all studied writing together. It was like being doused in Tabasco. I felt very down about it, but there’s not a lot I can do. I have to keep going and hit my 20,000 words before I can think about trimming and chopping. They didn’t like my character and did this terrible thing where they went around the room and summed her up in a word. The words weren’t good, in fact they were all kind of negative, like; ‘whiny’, ‘apathetic’, ‘masculine’. So after they’d diced my first 5000 words into little pieces I had to stay there whilst we went through two other pieces when all I wanted to do was do a Jackie Chan roll through the glass doors to the courtyard and escape screaming down the street, but instead I sat tight and had to get a lift home. Never again.

I have my original writers group tomorrow and I’ve given them the same 5000 words so it will be interesting to see if they hate it as well. Have not got anything done this week – last night I did a paragraph and the night before that I had to go to the beach in the evening because it was too goddamn hot to do anything else. This is not to say I would prefer snow. I wouldn’t.