Commitment

We're now into September (we're almost a week into September; gah) and that means that I'm getting up towards the pointy end of the deadline for this book about Adelaide. It's time to get serious. Actually I was already pretty serious, but it's time to get more serious.

To that end, I'm hoping that making a public commitment en blog to a daily minimum of work on the book, a commitment that will shame me into actually doing it.

So here it is: starting today, and working around the regular four novels a week reviewing gig, I must also do a minimum of either (a) writing 500 words or (b) two hours of work (writing, researching, self-editing, faffing around with the biliography) per day. Whichever comes first. Or both.

And not just during the working week but every day. 7/7. It works like flexitime: I can save up for a day off, or make up time afterwards. If the latter, it has to be within that working week. I'll use the appropriate blog to report back, and to shame myself publicly if need be. Perhaps the best place for updates is the readin' and writin' blog; with any luck they might spur me on to keep that a bit more alive.

(You thought this post was going to be about Relationships, didn't you. Hah, sucked in. I'm too old for that sort of malarkey. Talking about them publicly, or indeed at all, I mean. Nobody is too old for having them.)

UPDATE, 10.05 pm: three and a half hours' worth of reading/research/restructuring/faffing, which included writing 357 words. The question is, how long can I keep it up?

How embarrassment

The Age is reporting today that only one out of two Australian women in their 20s is having a regular pap smear test for cervical cancer.

Why? Apparently, it's because it's 'embarrassing'.

So here's what I want to know. Are these the same young women who wouldn't be seen dead sporting pubic hair?

And if they are, why is it more embarrassing to have a clinical examination done by a doctor (you can always go to a female doctor if that makes you feel less embarrassed) than it is to have your short-and-curlies ripped out by some total stranger whose training, if any, you know nothing about, and at whose hands you could end up with the most godawful rashes and infections?

If you get cervical cancer (and don't forget what aspiring Prime Minister Anthony John Rabbit thinks about Gardasil, the vaccine that could prevent it), things will be done to you by doctors that will be infinitely more invasive, painful, time-consuming and, yes, embarrassing than any pap smear. They will be done to you in an attempt -- an attempt that may well not be successful -- to save your life.

I love Gen Y. But sometimes I don't understand them at all.

Miles Franklin longlist: how wrong can you be?

Well. There goes my cred.

Utterly contrary to my predictions -- and my confidently nominated winner hasn't even made the longlist -- here is the actual longlist for the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award:

Breath - Tim Winton
A Fraction Of The Whole - Steve Toltz
The Devil's Eye - Ian Townsend
Ice - Louis Nowra
Addition - Toni Jordan
Fugitive Blue - Clare Thomas
One Foot Wrong - Sofie Laguna
The Pages - Murray Bail
The Slap - Christos Tsiolkas
Wanting - Richard Flanagan

More in a bit.