Right. I’ve set myself a deadline. I have to shake off this lethargy, this soul-bleaching feeling that I don’t have headspace to write.
It’s not writer’s block. It’s just a head full of stuff.
Doris Lessing knows. She reckons now that winning the Nobel Prize for Literature was a “bloody disaster”, and she has now stopped writing, according to the BBC.
“It has stopped, I don’t have any energy any more.”
Lessing said she now spends most of her time now being photographed and giving interviews.
“This is why I keep telling anyone younger than me, ‘don’t imagine you’ll have it forever.’
“Use it while you’ve got it because it’ll go, it’s sliding away like water down a plughole.”
Good advice. A plug hole is a very scary idea.

I guess I need to write this down.
My friend Mahina Tocker died today.
I’ve been in denial since her asthma attack last week but it’s not working for me now.
She’s gone.
I won’t go on about her many talents and awards – there’ll be plenty of that in the next few days, I’m sure, as people get their heads around it.
That won’t be easy. It seems quite impossible, that someone so boisterous and generous and loving – and yes, crazy – could be just … gone.
There are already tributes here and here. There’ll be more.
But the first time I saw her was on stage at Dallas Brooks Hall in Melbourne. I suppose it was about 1990. That’s the night she met Irena, who has been sitting by her bedside for the last week (O, my love!).
I remember other things besides the concerts and the songs.
I remember her telling me in all (deadpan) seriousness when I moved to New Zealand not to worry if I should come across a moa, because they hated the taste of Australians.
I remember her hammering on my front door because she’d found me a weta – a very small, very dead weta to be sure, but my first.
I remember her coming to all my book launches and crying with pride, buying copies for every kid she knew. She told CK Stead all about me, she said, which is a bit like telling Lucien Freud you have a friend with a talent for watercolours.
Playing percussion with a Post Office document tube.
Farting on stage and blaming some poor guy in the front row.
Endless streams of late night emails and messages, especially around trans-Tasman sporting events.
My favourite of her published poems, My Girlfriend’s Bad Haircut.
And her singing harmony, with Charlotte Yates, as if lightness and love could change the world. And in many ways they did.
I always thought she had the voice of an angel and I have never in my whole life wished so deeply and profoundly that there might be a heaven after all.
Go gently, girl. Sing up a storm up there (though you might want to go easy on the poo jokes).
Rest. Peace.
Arohanui, Tox.
Farewell.
(I just can’t believe I’m saying that.)

[A day or so later]
More tributes at kiwifolk and here and there was even a minute’s silence in parliament. Silence being, somehow, deeply appropriate.

Clearly I am in no danger of dying of blog-related stress, a new disease that has apparently claimed its first victims in the US. Two men dropped dead of heart attacks, due to the stress caused by having to keep their blogs updated.
So I’m not slack. It’s a preventive health measure.

Listening to…
Amy Winehouse (fabulous, and made me dig out my old Etta James cassette – yes, I said cassette, which just shows you how old it is. And that was a reissue.)
Cat Empire (still not sure whether or not I love it)

Reading…
Geraldine Brooks’ new novel, The People of the Book. It’s not as brilliant as March nor as compelling as The Year of Wonders. The voices aren’t as strong, and they are, after all, her forte. But she’s still my current hero.
(Next up, Anne Enright’s The Gathering)

Writing…
A little. Not enough.

Eating…
A gazillion tomatoes from the garden. Best ever.

A big week.
The first week in Parliament for our new government and we’re off with a bang, with the extraordinary and intensely emotional apology to the Stolen Generations.
I watched it on the big screen in one of the public spaces at work, with about 100 other staff, bawled my eyes out and will never forget it.
Will never forget, either, these years of shame and anger under Howard; his hectoring of the reconciliation convention; that march across the Harbour Bridge and the apology written across the sky.
Mind you, I did think the apology was supposed to be about much more: about colonisation and dispossession and two centuries of squalid treatment. But let’s not quibble just now.
May never forgive Brendan Nelson for attempting to diminish the impact of the words. Tosser.
(That’s my level of politicial engagement nowadays – which makes me realise that blogging is little more than an online form of shouting at the telly.)
Perhaps one day our collective gaze will grow wide enough to take in the detention centres, the other great source of shame and international embarrassment.

It doesn’t start with the blank page anymore.
It starts with File/New.
But the feeling is still kinda nice.
Although fresh stationery will never lose its appeal. I still need a new notebook for a new project. Even if I then randomly scribble in any notebook I can find.

Yes, I know. I’ve been neglectful.
I could promise to be a better blogger from this day forward but frankly I’m not sure whether I can live up to any New Year’s resolutions of any kind.
I simply must write another book or two this year. That’s the main goal. I have a couple on the way and I’ve barely glanced at them for months. So I won’t make any grand pronouncements today, as I have in the past, about turning over new leaves or sharpening pencils.
After all there a million things I need to do at the same time as writing books. Or, conversely, there are a million things that suck out my brains and leave me no time or headspace for writing books. These range from having a day job which was supposed to be stress-free but isn’t, to doing the washing.
Somewhere in amongst it all are a couple of stories trying pathetically to come out of the darkness and onto the weird backlit stage of the laptop. Via my mind.
A rocky road at the best of times.
At any rate lately I’ve been doing a raft of things rather than write books, such as building a garden (well, at present it’s more about tearing apart an old one – I keep hoping to come across Mary Lennox and Dickon behind a wall of ivy), and staring absently-mindedly into the air.
I suppose something will come of that one day.
Right now there’s a sulphur-crested cockatoo on the window sill, so I might watch him eat cherry plums. Instead of writing a book. Or blogging.

I was a bit sad that my pirate books didn’t get on the list for the Premier’s Reading Challenge here in Victoria, since every other kids’ book known to humanity seems to be on there. Maybe next year.
But I just discovered by accident that Ocean Without End was on the list in South Australia, where clearly dwell some sensible people of exquisite taste.
I’m even more chuffed to find that it was been selected by young readers in Western Australia to be on their 2007 WAYRBA book awards list.
And then you see a review from a young reader like this one, and it’s all worth it.

As we breathlessly wait for word on whether my home town has been accorded the official label of City of Literature, The Age has run a timely editorial on that idea, and its flipside – the need for greater focus on reader development and literacy.

And so say all of us.

Reading
Geraldine Brook’s The Year of Wonders (she’s my new hero)
Sally Vickers’ Miss Garnet’s Angel (she’s not)
Next up is A C Grayling’s Enlightenment tome, Toward the Light. I’m becoming more of an unreconstructed Enlightenment product the older I get and the madder the world becomes.

Watching
The kitten climb the Christmas tree (he’s obsessed)
X-Men 3 (well, I had to find out what happened to Jean Grey)
My bloody virus protection scan screen (for hours – it won’t stop and it won’t go away)

Listening to
Bushfire protection lectures from the local CFA
Possibly also the odd spin of Justin Timberlake

Eating
An awful lot of Christmas lunches at work
Lettuce, rocket and peas from my garden – tomatoes by next week

And also
The first reviews of Billabong Bill arrived (they’re posted over here)