Saturday, November 07, 2009

The danger of ham


I'm trying to write something difficult, well to be exact I'm finally getting around to writing something I should have done ages ago but since I'm really supposed to be setting up my council tax payments I thought this might be a better thing to do.
I'm also cleaning the house. You can tell when I'm writing something hard because the house is spotless. Currently the house still has some spots but they are fast disappearing.

Now I'm writing this instead of writing the thing I should be writing, arrgh.
Anyway, I used to have a system for writing. I'd get up early, brew some mind bendlingly strong coffee and sip it while bashing away furiously. For really hard stuff I'd put some jazz on, nothing with words in it though, otherwise they would start appearing it what I was writing. Occasionally I'd take breaks to brew more coffee or make some poached eggs on toast. I managed to squeeze out a book doing that.

The thing is I don't really drink coffee anymore, I rather drank too much of the stuff and it was making me ill. Decaf is all well and good but it doesn't make your face tingle and mind move faster than you can type, so I'm trying to find other things to help me write. Other treat foods so I can train myself that 'this is writing time.'

Today I got a huge hunk of ham, as part of my experiment to find writing food. You know one of those cooked ones that looks like something Asterix would eat after duffing up some Romans. It was extremely nice, so nice I did a little dance while eating it, but it also made me sleepy, and thirsty and now I want to drink wine and have a nap.

I've got some other foods to try out, those funny little expensive chocolate puddings that lonely people eat instead of having sex and some very thin biscuits. Biscuits seem to get better the less of them there are.

I'm hoping that one of these will become my new culinary muse and I can finally do that work. It's definitely not ham, Ham is tasty and a good rewards after fighting legionnaires but it's not right for when you have to churn out 1500 words before you will allow yourself to go to the pub.

So kids, I suppose the lesson in all of this is don't ham and write.

No comments: