Damn and blast!

Came into the State Library to do online work and the online site is temporarily down. I could take out my knitting - I'm working from the Foundation Member's lounge - a comfy little room on the third floor, off the domed reading room where there's even coffee. So I could take out my knitting - I'm the only one in the room and anyway, it's not as if you have to be reading or working to be here, but I'm hanging on to the fragile hope that the page will be up any minute. Ha! It's a computer problem - when were they ever saved on time?

In the meantime I'm not doing any writing. In fact, I'm thinking of declaring myself a recovering writer, rather than a real one. The reason? Probably too much teaching. Once I finish my teaching and tafe work I just want to hang out with the fish, or the kids, or the spinning. I don't want to dwell on knotty problems like what's happening with my story.

I don't think this is writer's block. It's more akin to ennui. Or laziness. Or perhaps an over-reaction to the cover of Magenta McPhee. I don't like the cover because it says nothing about the story inside. Also the blonde girl in hot pink on the cover is NOT my idea of how Magenta looks. I'm actually really unhappy about it. What do you think?

It shouldn't be enough to stop me writing, but I look at it and think, why bother? Why spend the next however many months tenderly writing a story that you hope will actually say something about people's lives and then have a kind of generic pink girls' cover put on it? That's where I am at the moment. Disgruntled. Ennui-ed. Over it. Whatever.