The Creative Breakdown: A Week in the Life Of

So I'm on holiday, and i can tell you that it's about time too.

The last few weeks (it was heading towards months actually) have been ridiculous.

Every night has been a late night, every morning an early morning, and with really only one day a week off to catch my breath. Granted, some might argue that the weekend is two days long, but those people are stupid.

Here's a breakdown of a week in the life of a creative:

• Monday: Just make it to work on time. Growl disagreeably at co-workers for six to eight hours before going home, then spend the rest of the night preparing the work for Tuesday that should have been done six to eight hours ago.

• Tuesday: Throw out everything you did on Monday night and start again. Work studiously throughout the day and try to leave a little early so that you can beat traffic, relax a bit and sort out your head-space for the rest of the week.

• Wednesday: Quickly realise that your few moments of valuable mental detox the day before have cost you valuable hours and that the presentation that you are supposed to make hasn't progressed much beyond the black-line marker scamp scratched between dozens of other "inspirational" doodles that you knew weren't going to work but which you spend hours drawing anyway because you were taught that it stimulates the "creative process". Smoke too much (optional). Drink incalculable amounts of coffee (non-optional). Get home late with more work than you started the day with. Work through the night and early morning, repeatedly cursing the fact that there's no beer in the fridge. Detox is forgotten under a barrage of caffine and nicotine.

• Thursday: Arrive late for work, not having slept. An aggressive sense of doom permiates you mood. You hate the world, your work and your alarm clock. You can't imagine how you're going to get everything done in the next twenty-four hours. You don't leave you desk for the next nine hours except to answer nature's incessant prodding. You go home miserable. By midnight, however, most of your problems seemed to have worked themselves out. The work looks suitably profesional and it begins to look like all your hard work and stress have paid off. You risk loosing a bit more sleep in order to check for and sort out any final layout problems. You go to bed confident that, even if a few little things go wrong, you should have no problem at all getting them sorted out before deadline.

• Friday: Everything goes wrong. Most likely you have woken up late. You have just had a small error pointed out to you that you would never have noticed but which apparently glares like a shining becon to everyone else. Normally it would have taken only minutes to fix, but in your overconfidence the night before and unaware of the effects that several days of lost sleep and your quickly growing coffee addiction have had on you, you command-S saved over you original file. You attempt to cram a day's worth of work into a few hours. Halfway through this you experience a moment of clarity wherein you realise that your idea is rubbish and that you should have stuck with the one you tossed out on Tuesday. You sneek into deadline with only moments to spare, swearing blind that you're happy with the work when in actual fact you believe that a quadraplegic chimpanzee with a dyslexic catfish sitting by it's side could have done better. You stop at the pub in order to miss traffic on the way home.

• Saturday: You arrive home sometime around sunrise, successfully having missed traffic. You climb into bed and sleep untill late afternoon, then watch movies from a horizontal possition on the couch while thinking of excuses why you can't meet your friends out tonight. For reasons unexplainable you still don't get to bed before one-thirty AM.

• Sunday: You try and enjoy your morning as much as possible. Maybe you stand in the sun for a few minutes. Then you drink a mug of coffee and begin prepairing for Monday, wishing that you had a longer weekend.

And that pretty much sums it up. But i'm out! (at least for a few weeks)

As it is, I doubt that I'm gonna get many chances to post stuff. I'll be flying off to Mauritius in a week or so for a familiy holiday, so it'll be complately dead over that time. I'm sure you can imagine how disapointed I am...

I'll post when I post. Hell, maybe I'll be totally lame and put up some pictures - but I wouldn't hold my breath.