Sixty minutes...tick...tock...

What are you waiting for? Forty one minutes...tempus is fugiting old boy...

It was supposed to be an hour. Hard to believe how easily you can toss away nineteen minutes without even thinking. Make some coffee. Open email. Sit and stare.

Hemingway once said that writing is easy. You just sit in front of the typewriter and bleed. So here I am decades later. Living the dream. Sitting in front of the iMac. Sweating.

Somewhere, somehow it all got difficult. There was a roll and then there wasn't. Words that poured out now stick under my skin like broken arrow heads needing to be plucked free. Be as delicate as you like. It's still going to hurt.

Thirty four minutes

Seven minutes yielded a hundred words. Not bad. Three or four of them might even survive the edit.

Stop whining. I just said you had to write, not that you had to write well.

“It's all a bit self-pitying though.”

“Oh, are we talking out loud now?”

“It would seem so.”

“How very arty.”

“Thanks. I thought it was inspired. Maybe the word count includes speech marks?”

“I doubt that very much.”

“It would be nice if it did.”

“Yeah.”

Twenty nine minutes

“That's it for the 'out loud' bit then?”

Yes.

“Mind if I keep talking?”

Yes. Why don't you do something useful like list your excuses for not writing? You love making lists.

“Fine. If you think it will help. Hello...? Are you still there...?”

1. It's the iMac. I don't like the keyboard and I'm battling to type properly.

2. It doesn't h...

How about before you go on to point two you take a moment to be honest about excuse number one?

“I was being honest! The keyboard is quite tricky and it...”

...hasn't caused you any problems tonight since sitting down to actually attempt to type on it. In fact I'd go as far as to say that it's giving off a satisfying little thud with every strike and feels a lot more solid than you'd expect from something so small yet perfectly formed.

“Are you Steve Jobs?”

Do I sound like I'm wearing a turtleneck?

“How should I know?”

Move on

2. It doesn't have a decent word processor

Other than the quite excellent free one you downloaded over a month ago?

3. The room is full of clutter and it's not conducive to creativity.

Ok, I hate to break it to you but just because you've managed to write a whole hilarious story with a swearing cat you aren't exactly Murakami.

4. I'm tired all the time

“OK I need to talk to you about this one.”

“What? I am tired all the time, it's a fact.”

“And why are you tired all the time?”

“Well work has been busy for starters and then the kids have been...”

“How long are you going to keep this up?”

“Keep what up?”

“The pretense that ninety five percent of your tiredness issues have been caused by anything other than having a couple of drinks with supper and then turning into a lazy shit?”

“That's completely unfair! I've been...”

“You've been what? True to the plan you set out for yourself earlier in the year? Don't make me laugh. The only thing stopping you from writing is you. Well, 'you' along with episodes of Master Chef, House of Cards, PGA Tour Golf and fannying about on Wikipedia under the delusional bracket of 'research'. Man up.”

Eleven minutes

Oh and while you're digesting all that, feeling a bit sorry for yourself and searching for a well thought out lie to refute everything I said you also need to apply the same level of honesty as to why you haven't been running. Lard arse.

“I'm genetically programmed to have basically no arse so no danger of that.”

Fine. Moobs. Six Minutes.

There was a point to this at some point...

The point was for there not to be a point.

“No. The point was for me to be character assassinated by my subconscious, clearly.”

“Did you have fun?”

“What?”

“Did you have fun? Like...was this better than not writing a single word and then going to bed depressed by your own lame excuses?”

“Yeah. It was.”

“Same time tomorrow?”

“Yeah why not. Although I've run out of Earl Grey so I may need to stop off at the shops, and there's a lot of meetings at work tomorrow so supper will probably be quite late and...”

Time's up. Post it. Go to bed.