Dear Fucking Diary

"I do not envy you the headache you will have when you awake. But for now, rest well and dream of large women."

Well now, it's been a while since we've had one of these entries. Yes, it's 2:34am and I'm officially bored clean out of my restless mind. Today was my day off, and it's fair to say that I have now wasted it. I dragged myself out of bed just after one for an expedition to the Post Office, where I collected a couple of CDs I'd ordered from America and paid the outrageous customs fee with a grimace and victory in the battle to stop myself from spitting on the glass that separated me from the Post Office Man. I then returned home and watched Resident Evil: Apocalypse...

- Capsule Review: Milla Jovovich and a whole bunch of people you've never heard of do battle against undead hordes that behave differently than they did in the original film. There is no explanation for this. The movie is basically an inexcusable exercise in style over substance, and having watched The Bride do battle with the Crazy 88 in Kill Bill just a couple of nights back, I feel that describing the action sequences as sub-Matrix dross filmed by people who really do feel that things are more convincing in blurry slow-motion is perfectly reasonable. The script was woeful, the acting painfully mediocre, and the last twenty minutes made less sense than that bit when the dwarf talks backwards in Twin Peaks. I give this film headache out of ten.

To get over the pain in my skull, I lay in the dark for a while, listening to sinister Italian prog-rock from the seventies. Then I ate a whole chicken pie. Then I watched The Princess Bride...

- Capsule Review: Hahahahahahahaha...hehehehehehehehe...awesome. I will NEVER have seen this film enough times.

After that, I got on the computer and fooled around with incidental music, various chunks of dialogue, themes from children's TV shows, and some choice cuts from the likes of David Holmes, Fluke, Groove Armada, and...uh...Prefab Sprout. This aural fuckery will result in a present for somebody, so I can't say anything else about it.

Then I wrote e-mails to N (Theme: Meh. Everything sucks) and Jennifer (Theme: Waaaaaah...I miss you).

And here I am, sitting comfortably at my computer with absolutely nothing of any value to offer my readership. It was typing or masturbation, and while in many ways the two are similar, I chose typing because it's less strenuous and not as messy.

I really should have written something today. Something potentially interesting, I mean. Seriously, other than reworking a short called Aria for Clean Sheets, I still haven't written anything of note in 2005. Even that dumb zombie piece is sitting on my hard drive in the form of two paragraphs describing a grizzled old man with a shotgun sitting in some kind of lookout. At night. Christ, maybe I should change him into Milla Jovovich and have him leap out and do a bunch of bullet-time somersaults into a horde of CGI hench-zombies. Yeah, Resident Evil: [Insert B-Movie Noun Here], by Michael O'Mahony. I could make millions and then, I don't know, buy a big fucking car or something. Yay.

There's no sense of urgency, and maybe that's my problem. My wandering mind has found its way back to the whole Welcome To Forever concept the last few weeks. I really do have plenty of good ideas I think will work in the context of these stories and the way they're linked. I just can't seem to work up the enthusiasm to actually get the ball rolling. I can't seem to see it as something immediate, something now. It's just one more thing.

Motivation. Yeah, now we're cooking with gas (I have always, ALWAYS wanted to type that). I am the least motivated person you are ever likely to meet. If not doing something means people I love will die horribly, then I might think about maybe getting out of bed and sketching some kind of vague outline that may, someday, become a plan. Mostly, though, if my current situation isn't all that painful (and more importantly, if my current situation means I'm being left alone), then leaving things as they are tends to be my preferred option. I have always been that way. I was one of the smartest kids in my year at school, yet my coursework marks were always horrible. It was only in exams that I fulfilled my potential. When the pressure was on, I got some educational arse-kicking done. I aced my GCSE English exam so comprehensively that - even without ANY COURSEWORK AT ALL (I had 25% knocked off my overall grade and my mum had to pay for me to enter the exam) - I walked away with a B. The problem was not that I couldn't do it. It was that I didn't.

Same thing here. I'm not insecure about writing a novel. There's nothing frightening about it. I'm perfectly confident that I could write a rip-roaring bastard of a story that would tear your still-beating heart out of your chest and make you view the world in a completely different way (slight exaggeration). But I don't. And sitting here, typing this out and frowning at the utter lack of logic in what I'm saying, I find myself at a loss as to why.

"Gee," you're thinking. "I wonder why a guy whose thoughts run on a such a squeaky hamster wheel of pointless procrastination gets insomnia. Just write the fucking book already, I'm getting old reading your mental vomiting, and tearing my heart out of my chest with your amazing tales of whatever won't do either of us much good if the sheer monotony of your whining slows it to the point where I keel over and quietly expire."

And you're right. I guess there are no deep-seated psychological reasons for this lack of progress. I guess I'm just a fat, lazy bastard.

So here's the plan. I've got to try something new because those resolutions I made a couple of months back are being held up by this shit. I've got to come up with a schedule or a routine or something that will put me in front of this computer on a regular basis with the idea being to not post my random mutterings here or at various forums, to not write strange e-mails to my friends because it makes me giggle when they freak out, and to not look at porn. I've got to be sitting down for at least a couple of hours every day I have them spare and working at putting together the idea that's been ping-ponging around my head for more than a year now. So...

New resolution: First draft of Welcome To Forever before the end of May. That's almost three months, which should be more than enough time. As my readership and witnesses to this fresh vow, I expect you to remind, badger, and abuse me as we get closer to the deadline. Okay, I don't expect it, but I am asking you if you could. It would help. I don't have anybody here to ask me just why the fuck I'm sitting around watching films I've seen before when I could be working on something nobody has seen before. So do it for me, and if you have any kind of interest in seeing me get to the end of this thing, do it for yourself.

There. From boredom to analysis to a plan of action. I knew this blog would come in handy one day.