Ahh, retail therapy. It really does work wonders. Even more so when you can actually use whatever it is you buy. Most of the time I'll be out running errands and decide I need a nice wooden bowl carved out of a tree stump, or a hookah, or seasons 1 through 4 of Blackadder on DVD. But yesterday was retail therapy with a purpose. I had to be up at the crack of dawn (about 9am) for a Las Vegas community theatre get together, which was rough to say the least. But as I was up, and as the meeting was finished with time for me to go back home before headed to work, I stopped off in Office Depot and bought myself a white board.

'A white board?' I hear you say. 'Why yes,' I reply. 'A big fricking white board, 3'x4', and about an hour ago I hung it on my wall, removing the Pirelli calendar pictures I had up there- it's not porn, it's art cos it's black and white and pirelli and monica bellucci. The Nelson Mandela quote is still up there.

Now there's a big damn white board staring down at me. I've just written up the summary of me novel, and started keeping track of characters, their ages and other timelines within the story, and now I don't have to go back leafing through 23-odd pages of scribble to try and remember what Tomar's girlfriend is called, or who originally came from which country. Not that any of that is set in stone, and the chances are I'll decide I don't like he sound of some of the names and change them, but it's easier now to remember who I'm talking about. Or probably would be if I was actually writing instead of writing about writing. But that's today from 12-2. Now I've got a big bloody piece of motivation hung on me wall, and I'm not sure there are any excuses left for me to use. I may well have exhausted my near-endless supply of them.

Nah, I just think at this point it's easier to write than to keep excusing myself.