Ten minutes in a hotel room

Call this a writing exercise if you like; call it stream of consciousness, call it a warm up. Here's ten minutes worth of waffle from a hotel room. I'm away on business, and as often happens in these situations, the siren's song of an empty hotel room, an active internet connection and time on my hands leads me to want to do one thing: write.

I have a weird thing about hotel rooms, and being alone in them far from home. They bring out this guy, the guy I am now, the alternative writing persona who's not that far removed from "randy Pan, the Goat Boy" as Bill Hicks would say. I've written some of my best stuff in hotel rooms, to be honest, although one problem I definitely do have is starting stuff in environments like this and not finishing. Not a good habit.

I don't know what it is, but I'll struggle to define it. It's something about the delicious anonymity of hotels, the idea that anyone could be here, that anything could happen. You could do anything in these situations and the likelihood is no-one would ever find out. I should stress it's never, ever happened to me, at least not since I've been married. I've had a couple of intimate encounters in hotel rooms, and only one of which I can recall being particularly fun... but they were all in my 'wild' and 'carefree' single days.

These days, I tend to confine myself to wild and carefree writing. Here, undistracted by anything else, I get some of my best ideas down, my best work. I think it's partially just because of the inherent romanticism (for me) in the idea of being a writer at work in some hotel room. There are plenty of examples of writers who have holed themselves up in hotels to do their work, so many in fact that there are well known fictional examples too (The Shining, anyone?). We like the idea of being focused. No past, no future, just the present - the keyboard, the screen (or paper) and The Writing.

Three minutes left. So what's it going to be tonight? I don't know. First of all I think I'll get down some of the ideas I have had rattling around my head in the past couple of days. A refinement of an old idea, a sort of riff on Charlie's Angels. Something involving twins, and probably, trains. Something else that just came to me involving a hotel - duh. When those are noted (Never, ever let go of an idea, folks... you never know when you'll need 'em) I'll strive to work on something in progress. Inch towards completion.

Dying seconds. Hope you've enjoyed recent stuff, I really appreciate all the comments; feel free to keep 'em coming. I'll be releasing something else next, something not Spider-Girl; there, I said it. We'll see.

Right. Off to it.