When your life slows down you ...

... consider writing blogs about Channel Ten.

But really, in a blog where I try to practise my writing as often as possible, the difficulty is in cracking that little word "possible".
Give me an hour and I will give you a beautiful story.
Give me a day and I will present you with a hilarious novel.
Give me a week and I will begin to wonder what the hell you've done with my family. Then I'll do some editing and storyboard a short film.
I used to get all dark and resigned as I began receiving joyous emails telling me that my colleagues were finishing their Phds. How come they were finishing? They had it so easy ...
Then I realised: none of them were starting young families and working full time. They were just at different stages in their lives.

Probably the most creative and fruitful thing a writer who doesn't write produces is excuses:
I'm too tired.
I don't have time.
I have to do something on the internet.
I'm really looking forward to watching this show.
The housework isn't going to do itself.
The weekend is just so busy.
It's that time of year.
I've just got to finish this other thing, then I can get right on it.
An hour isn't long enough.

What's that?
Those excuses aren't that creative and wonderful?
Well, they're definitely more refined and developed than anything else I've produced lately. I'm sure the circadian Ninjacockle will agree with me that good writing takes more time than raising healthy children. Indeed, it takes about the same time.
And, as attractive as playing the role of whisky-soaked writer/father/life-long enigma to our little darlings is, it takes a special kind of arsehole and neither of us are made of that particular brand of sphincter.
Plus, we also know that in every story of writing success, the drunken scribe is never the actual successful writer; he or she is always the muse. They are the dark, howling backdrop to the intense life of artistic torment that is bestowed upon their brilliant children.
What's the point of devoting fifty years to raw, powerful manuscripts and liver disease if you're just going to let the eventual spoils slip through your gnarled fingers into the hands of your cowering children?
There you are, hunched over your netbook, drinkin', emotin' and ignorin', pumping out these spirit-strangling tomes, too raw and powerful for the times during which they were written. Meanwhile, the offspring are waiting in the wings for you to drop dead of an embolism or something so they can carefully delete all your files, identify your beautiful corpse and draft up their own sly little (raw, powerful) volume, which will be reverse-ironically titled Dad was a drunken arsehole. It will sell like half-price haggis and inject the English language with dozens of new idioms (none of which will refer to Celtic delicacies, all of which will funnel copyrighted royalties into your offspring's Rowland-sized bank account).
Your successful, wealthy child will fund various attempts to reanimate you, either for a final hug or something future psychologists will refer to as "cryo-closure", but your writing success will continue to be denied because the precious hour I mentioned above will be spent not at a keyboard, recording the raw, powerful philosophical keystones that will naturally flow from the reactivated regions of your frontal cortex. That one valuable hour will spent floating in a tank of positively-charged cryo-gel while the child you ignored some 150 years previously either tries to hug you while wearing a protective scuba suit or just gives you a right ear-bashing for drinking too much, not getting a job and not realising that "raw" and "powerful" in writing terms means "unedited" and "full of swear-words instead of proper exposition".