After Italian pizza and The Hunger Games, the cultural non-highlight of the month was NOT being able to watch the start of series 5 of Mad Men because I am too tight or too proud to have a dish on the roof. I will it seems, have to wait. Back to The Hunger Games. Earlier this year I managed to read all 3 parts of Suzanne Collins' Katniss trilogy in just five days. What a book! The film is good, not great - mainly because it adheres so close to the beats of the book it ends up being a good retelling of the written tale, without ever really getting you in the gut in the way a great film can. But there have been some great films recently. I loved watching Midnight in Paris (ace), Moneyball (ace), Tinker Taylor (ace, but slow) in the space of a few days days, then lurched in to guilt for not hitting the keys harder in recent weeks. I currently have two projects on the go concurrently, or rather, not on go concurrently. I am ponderously writing a synopsis of a wonderful original novel set in the late nineteenth century. But not another Leicester Square style epic - more Sunday night TV, dripping with Northern accents, desperate slums and tales of heroic self-made types haunted by ghosts from the past, and bursting with characters full of jealousy, anger and ambition. The second project (a novel) has been dusted down after some 26 years (or so) in draft form. The synopsis and first three chapters are now beautifully typo free and ready for pitching. I need to KNUCKLE down and get some of this stuff out there and read. A common experience amongst writers seems to be that the block to progress is not the sheer effort needed not to do the writing, but to focus actually focus on the writing in the first place. I have tried being "locked in a cabin in the woods" (pretty much) with only the keyboard to keep me company. I found myself though spending way too much time trying to get a phone signal or some semblance of wifi during coffee breaks. My productivity soared when I drove out to coffee shop, that had decent Wifi. So in isolation, I never really became any more productive than I am when I write early morning before the office, or in the evening during some armageddon homework meltdown that makes Wave Your Arms towers shake like a war zone. One of the other barriers to progress seems to be the habit of blogging about writing rather than actually, erm…writing. Logging off.