My booky wookie...

An old uni chum recently asked me where I was at with the film script I began writing near the end of university. Well, it’s no longer a film script. They be fuck hard to write! Over-dosing on formatting at the expense of telling the story was too much of a tedious chore for my liking. So, the script is now a book, a much better medium for expressing the images, characters and thoughts that currently reside in my mind. Or it would be a book if I was 1) competent enough to portray the images in my head in appropriate words capable of forming readable sentences 2) not so inherently lazy and 3) not easily distracted by films, music, gaming, football, beer, etc. I’ve only managed to get around 6,000 words written in the last 10 years, meaning I’ve led a largely mis-spent adulthood arseing around playing too many games (nothing wrong with that though, right?).

In all, books are also fuck hard to write, and whilst I’ll dabble a bit when I muster the energy, I’d rather bide my time waiting until scientists create a thingy-o-metre that downloads the content of my book straight from my mind onto a Word document. Can’t be long now until some clever twonk makes an app for that...! Anyway, until such a time where we catch up with the future, I’ve taken the decision to resolve the above and at least attempt to double the content of my book by Christmas. Task number one in this endeavour: buy a laptop. Whilst, I have a desktop PC, it’s more of a gaming machine which, when switched on, only serves as a further distraction from cracking on with any writing. What would you prefer - staring blankly at a Word document for two hours, coming up with nothing but a few crappy sentences before weeping uncontrollably into your keyboard? Or, blowing seven shades of shit out of some Latvian goof on Team Fortress 2? So, my desktop is really to blame for the current situation, not me or my prevailing sense of procrastination at all. 

A laptop, however, presents a new level of opportunity at knuckling down and getting things done. I could pretty much write whenever and wherever I want to. On the toilet, in bed, on the commute to and from work, at lunchtime – sounds blissful. No longer will I devise a scene in my head across Waterloo Bridge and not have a pen to jot down said thought, so that by the time I get home to my desktop the image imprinted on my brain has simply vanished, leaving just a small residue of shit between my ears. That way leads to frustration, a ‘why bother’ approach and the dark side. No, from now on it would be out with the laptop on the train, the punching of a few keys and immediate success; some of the images swirling around upstairs would suddenly stick and to the page no less. The laptop is, therefore, a plan with no obvious drawbacks.

So I purchased one a couple of weeks back (Samsung, 6gb Ram, 600gb hard-drive and on-board Nvidia graphics card) and immediately installed Civilisation 5. I’m such a weak willed workshy tit…