What counts as work?

I'd like to know. More than that, I'd like to know and put that knowledge into useful practice.

Because when I'm not in the middle of drafting a script, I can't help the sneaky feeling that whatever I happen to be doing, no matter how professionally constructive or helpful it might prove further down the line, it is Not Real Work.

I'm Scots, profoundly irreligious (what do you mean atheism is simply a different form of faith? THE ONLY GODS ARE THE ONES WE MAKE IN OUR IMAGE, YOU MORON*#), but carry the weight of my grandparents cultural baggage, i.e. Presbyterian moral righteousness**, certitude, and the notion that salvation is won through through work. Which goes to show that the cultural import and value of religion is far more lasting and significant than its core supernatural beliefs.

The upshot is, if I'm sitting in a comfy chair reading a book, or a magazine, or a script, or surfing the web looking at useful stuff, or going for a walk, if I'm not sweating, feeling vaguely anxious, harried by deadlines, and tapping that keyboard like my fingers are miniature Michael Flatley's legs*** I AM NOT DOING WHAT I SHOULD BE DOING.

Which is working.

This is of course complete rubbish, and that false belief is the bane of my bloody life. Here I am, with a few blessed weeks between gigs, with time to dream a bit, let stuff just grow, seed new projects, and what am I doing? Sitting writing this as a form of displacement activity so that I can get to lunchtime nursing a guilty feeling that I haven't done any real work. So I've got something to worry about. So I've got some pressure. So I can do some work.

Stupid.

Got a CD of scripts from the excellent Screenwriters Store, because I'm supposed to be developing something in simliar territory to an enormously popular American show that I've only ever seen about 20 minutes of. Enough to get the picture, but I felt I should do some research. Not that it counts as work, of course. The bonus was finding some interesting treatments and synopses, which for me are more useful than scripts because they are far harder to write than scripts.

And found something to slaver over. Mm, chunky and functional.

Which reminds me of this, one of the items I purchased (except unlined! Bliss!) during a very pleasant forty five minutes in Muji on Oxford Street. I know it's not a big thing, but it's one of those small bricks of pleasure that help me build a happy life. I just got it out to admire it again, then carefully replaced it in the drawer where it will doubtless remain for months, or even years (it's so nice and so special it can't be used for just notes, they have to be special notes), until I realise I don't need it and hand it to our daughter to chew and shred. And it will still have been a satisfying purchase.


*My that felt good. In these days of polite moral relativism, the done thing is to say "I respect your belief and your right to hold it." Well fine, I respect your right to hold idiot beliefs, but you know what? I have no respect for the belief itself at all.

And breathe.

I have an itchy throat and may have a cold coming.

**see *

***you've never seen miniature Riverdance? The Potty Time apotheosis

#or, as Mr. Hume more elegantly put it, 'the only necessary god is the vitality of the universe.