Frustration
Finally I've started to work on my book again. Its been a while and to be honest I am glad I took the break. The entire book has always been inside my head, the characters all worked out and the plots unfolding nicely inside my mind.
But I was struggling to type as fast as I can dream up twists in the plots and new characters and new angles and stuff that I just decided to put the whole project on the backburner.
This happened before I left England in February, and all I brought with me to Australia was a few clothes and a copy of my book on floppy disk.
So now I've been on the road for just over 4 months, I'm refreshed, bursting with new ideas and enthusiasm. Its just a pain to get time to work on it because all computer usage costs money and I don't want to write it out in ink because I just CANNOT sit through the monotonous drone of typing up something. I need a laptop or somnething, but lets be serious here. It would get stolen.
The book is too big to fit on a floppy now, so i took to mailing copies to various email accounts to get hard copies saved. But Hotmail is more gay than a Village People fab convention and seem to have restricted their size limit to 512 MB, which means the last time I mail saved the book it didn't save and I have lost some of my work.
Thats so bloody annoying.
Anyway I sat in the peace and quiet of my dingy hostel room the other day while everyone else was at work ( i took the day off because my farm harvest has come to an end til next week and I could not be bothered to work picking Zuccinis for like 5 bucks an hour) and wrote out the remaining plotlines in my notebook. Also got down a few good quotes and new ideas, so no matter what the book will be finished.
Hopefully by the time I leave Australia so I can get to work on trying to get somewhere with it before I leave for the highway again.
So what else is new? I've decided theres a good way to look on my current situation. Its kind of like is the glass half empty or half full, but my theory goes is your mind a prison or a holiday camp?
The prison mind would say I was sharing a cramped and dirty hostel room where I have less personal space than a sardine crammed into a tin, that I'm breaking my back in the blistering heat 6 times a day for average money and that at the end of the day I line up with the rest of the inmates to receive a small and inadequate meal to feed me for a days slog.
Holiday camp mind would say I was sharing a room in a place that is cheap to live with a host of fellow travellers from around the world where we can share cultures and experiences and get a real slice of life outside what we know. I get to work in a beautiful state forest 6 days a week in gorgeous sunshine and earn enough money to save up for my scuba diving trips, my skydiving and white water rafting and the rest of my travels across Australia. Plus after work we get free food for our effort.
So I guess it all comes down to how you look at it. I mean I admit I'd rather be in Darwin getting drunk every night and and having 4 WD adventures through rainforests to nurse the hangover but that can only happen as a consequence of me being here.
So I'm in holiday camp mode.
Not much drama has happened lately apart from 20 drunken guys fighting in the street outside the hostel last night, and the German guy in our room getting punched by one of the hostel workers for openly smoking weed in the common room.
Violence is definitely common around here.
World Cup final tonight, and I'd rather Brazil win than Germany but those bastards knocked us out so I'm totally indifferent.
But I was struggling to type as fast as I can dream up twists in the plots and new characters and new angles and stuff that I just decided to put the whole project on the backburner.
This happened before I left England in February, and all I brought with me to Australia was a few clothes and a copy of my book on floppy disk.
So now I've been on the road for just over 4 months, I'm refreshed, bursting with new ideas and enthusiasm. Its just a pain to get time to work on it because all computer usage costs money and I don't want to write it out in ink because I just CANNOT sit through the monotonous drone of typing up something. I need a laptop or somnething, but lets be serious here. It would get stolen.
The book is too big to fit on a floppy now, so i took to mailing copies to various email accounts to get hard copies saved. But Hotmail is more gay than a Village People fab convention and seem to have restricted their size limit to 512 MB, which means the last time I mail saved the book it didn't save and I have lost some of my work.
Thats so bloody annoying.
Anyway I sat in the peace and quiet of my dingy hostel room the other day while everyone else was at work ( i took the day off because my farm harvest has come to an end til next week and I could not be bothered to work picking Zuccinis for like 5 bucks an hour) and wrote out the remaining plotlines in my notebook. Also got down a few good quotes and new ideas, so no matter what the book will be finished.
Hopefully by the time I leave Australia so I can get to work on trying to get somewhere with it before I leave for the highway again.
So what else is new? I've decided theres a good way to look on my current situation. Its kind of like is the glass half empty or half full, but my theory goes is your mind a prison or a holiday camp?
The prison mind would say I was sharing a cramped and dirty hostel room where I have less personal space than a sardine crammed into a tin, that I'm breaking my back in the blistering heat 6 times a day for average money and that at the end of the day I line up with the rest of the inmates to receive a small and inadequate meal to feed me for a days slog.
Holiday camp mind would say I was sharing a room in a place that is cheap to live with a host of fellow travellers from around the world where we can share cultures and experiences and get a real slice of life outside what we know. I get to work in a beautiful state forest 6 days a week in gorgeous sunshine and earn enough money to save up for my scuba diving trips, my skydiving and white water rafting and the rest of my travels across Australia. Plus after work we get free food for our effort.
So I guess it all comes down to how you look at it. I mean I admit I'd rather be in Darwin getting drunk every night and and having 4 WD adventures through rainforests to nurse the hangover but that can only happen as a consequence of me being here.
So I'm in holiday camp mode.
Not much drama has happened lately apart from 20 drunken guys fighting in the street outside the hostel last night, and the German guy in our room getting punched by one of the hostel workers for openly smoking weed in the common room.
Violence is definitely common around here.
World Cup final tonight, and I'd rather Brazil win than Germany but those bastards knocked us out so I'm totally indifferent.