Your leading lady represents women; represent them well.

Been super busy these last few weeks. I'm delirious with busyness, hence my careless and dorky use of the word "super". Yesterday morning, I actually had to give myself a pep talk before I could get up. My alarm went off at 7am, and these were my first thoughts: "What in Santa's name is that noise? Aliens? What are they doing here? ...Oh wait. Alarm. Oh dear. OK, come on, girl. You can do it. You are strong. You are a strong woman. You can do this, YEAH!!!!!"

And then the little bitch inside me reached out, hit snooze, rolled over and went back to sleep.

That's just the way it's been lately.

But I've discovered a lot, writing-wise, lately. I've learned to be disciplined, for one. I actually have a timetable now, would you believe. When you work full-time and still want to pursue other stuff and have a social life, sometimes you just have to walk the dorky green mile and set yourself limits. Monday to Friday 9-5 is when I make money; Saturdays, Friday evenings and one other weekday evening is mine to go out, chill out or slob out, and all the other weekday evenings and Sunday are writing time. So far, it's working. I "finished" my play, then read it back, gave an inward sigh, proclaimed "No" and decided to rewrite half of the thing entirely. Perhaps that sounds like the only direction I'm headed in is backwards, but I prefer to look at this thing as glass half-full. This play is going to be epic. I spent lunchtime today writing a monologue for "Adam", an underachieving 37-year-old single father to one 17-year-old superbrain girl. I used to think that it was crazy - me, a 23-year-old, well-educated woman, trying to put myself into the mindset of someone my polar opposite - but it's not, really. We're all people. We all feel stuff, we all get happy and sad and angry and insecure. We all fart, we all shit - to put it pleasantly.

One thing that has become evident is that my writing is always going to slant towards bigging up women. I am never going to write something exclusively sympathetic to men. There are enough men in positions of authority and enough women still being regarded for solely their sexuality, that I think it's important that those who can should do their bit to change that. And as well as working on my own play, I've also been dabbling about on my brother's upcoming feature film, Goodnight Gloria, and acted as a bit of a "scriptwriter consultant" on occasion. Here's a film with a leading female character with so much potential to make a statement on behalf of women: we make stuff happen; we make our own happiness.

And so, I have formed my writer's motto: "Your leading lady represents women; represent them well."

And on that note, I went to the pub yesterday evening, which means that Thursday evening belongs to the notebook and biro.