I'm in a funk.

There's nothing to write, I'm bored and frustrated because of the nothing to write, I'm cranky because of the boredom and frustration, I'm slightly sleepy because of the crankiness, and this sleepiness has lead me into the aforementioned funk.

I can blame it on many things. I have a cold (or a specific form of demonic possession in which maleficent agents of Beelzebub crawl into my sinuses and perform horrible ablutions - medical opinion is divided), and maybe that's it. My study is painted dark red and has no proper window, my mobile phone has contracted fainting sickness, Naomi Robson exists - all these are distressing to varying degrees.

But it's not any of this, and I know it. There is one reason alone for the funk, and it is this: I'm living in the future.

Readers of the previous post will know that I recently received a piece of tantalising news, namely a very positive report of my novel Here Be Dust Bunnies from a publisher in London. It is now in the hands of the man who will decide if he wishes to publish my book or not, which decision he will make some time in the next few weeks.

So I'm clock watching. Ideas languish, cruelly neglected, on my whiteboards; a film script about feuding university professors which I began a few weeks ago and which was starting to look quite promising has slipped down the back of my mental couch cushions and vanished from sight. How can I possibly write until I hear from London?

I asked my friend Oscar about this problem at a café yesterday. He told me that since he had bought a house several months ago, he had found himself obsessing about mortgage payments, putting off little purchases and pleasures for an imaginary day when his financial pressures would abate.

He found himself, he told me, living in the future.

"What do you mean?"

He ordered another coffee. "You know about living in the past? When you can't stop thinking about some traumatic or embarrassing thing from years ago, so it occupies your life now and stops you getting on with things?"

"I'm familiar with the concept," I said.

"Well, this is exactly like that, and just as unhealthy, except instead of the past, it's the future that stops you getting on with things right now."

I considered this. "How are you dealing with it?"

Oscar drained his coffee. "I order another coffee whenever I feel like it, for a start."

He did.

"And that makes you feel more connected with the here and now?"

"Well, the more coffee I drink the more impulsive I become and the more coffee I order," explained Oscar, "so by late morning I tend to feel connected to the here and now, the ghost of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and a quasar at the edge of the known universe I've decided to call Ian."

"I'll get the bill," I said.

He's right, of course. I can't write anything now because I'm obsessed with an email I might receive next week, or six weeks from now. Or never. Whenever I start work on, say, my script, instead of inspiring myself with comical pratfalls and misunderstandings over an oversized marital aid, I'm thinking: "Is this the right project to work on next, career-wise?".

So screw it. I'm going to take Oscar's advice, connect to the here and now and write my script, because that's what I feel like.

I'll just quickly check my email first.