Sarah-Kate Lynch

Thanks to your comment from the last blog, Julie, I have discovered that I do have a button just like the one you described. Exhibit A is to the left. How about that!!

Gosh, last April was busy. So was February. I shall attempt to keep up the fair-to-middling work this year.

Off to do my Tracey Anderson Post Pregnancy Workout DVD now. I bought it by mistake as I am not post pregnant, I'm extremely not post pregnant, but when it arrived I was quite pleased as I thought never having had children would give me an advantage when it came to the exercises.

It did not.

If this is how the celebrity yummy mummies get their bodies back they deserve to be size why-bother.

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Am I the only one who wakes up in the middle of the night and thinks mad thoughts? Why did I buy those shoes when I know I will break my ankle in them? Ankles? Why didn't I become a teacher instead of a writer? Why is my book which I've already spent more than a year writing about a woman called Sugar who sells Honey instead of a woman called Honey who sells Sugar?

In the morning I remember that the shoes were on sale, you only need one ankle anyway, teachers are over-worked and underpaid plus have to go to school, and Sugar's bees are the buzz in my book and actual sugar doesn't have that, apart from the diabetic kind.

And anyway, why worry?

(1) I'm going to Paris for the spring

and

(2) I'm going to Paris for the spring.

This has to be the weirdest summer ever. On Sunday we drove half an hour to Muriwai beach and no sooner had I laid down in the sand, put my sunscreen on and closed my eyes than it started to pee with rain. What the? The rain actually stuck to the SPF 15 and did something deeply deeply unattractive. We then drove the half hour back to town and in a fit of pique I booked tickets to the movies but no sooner had I done that than the fecking sun came out again. 24 degrees Celsius. I mean, really? On the plus side, we went to see the new Sherlock Holmes so weather be damned. (1) I love Robert Downey and (2) I forgive Jude Law for everything between Mr Ripley and Watson.

In the February issue of Next I review Delicacy by David Foenkinos. Translated from French, it's won all the fancy pants awards it can in France and the author himself has written and directed a film version of it starring Audrey Tatou. It's the sort of book I love: a quirky romance between a grieving French beauty and a gawky Swedish office worker. David Foenkinos sounds like a guy worth catching up with for a glass of wine too. A Parisian, here are his top 5 favourite things to do in the City of Lights...

David Foenkinos’s 5 Favourite Things to do in Paris
1. Go and fetch my son from school
2. Wander through the bookshops along the Seine
3. Watch the women pass by when I’m sitting outside a café
4. Go right to the top of the Buttes Chaumont park
5. Stay in bed at home

I'm going to Paris later in the year - a significant birthday is going to be avoided there - and I vow to do everything but fetch his son from school. I'd even do that if he asked me.

In readiness, (for Paris in general, not the school run) I went to see Midnight in Paris again during the week. The LA Times says this is the biggest box officer earner of his career and I like it a lot, plus the city itself has a starring role.

However nothing will ever beat Annie Hall.

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After accidentally watching lunch time TV I was moved to feel bad about my lack of chiselled abs.

I try to exercise every day but no matter how hard I work at it, my abs remain unchiselled. Even if they were chiselled, they would appear to be buried deep beneath the rather more spongey elements of my torso so I'm not sure I would ever get to see them.

I know what my friend Ronnie would say if I was stupid enough to complain about my flabs. (Actually, I was stupid enough.)

She would say (1) "That's what clothes are for!" (Actually, she did say that.)

To which I would add (2) I don't have to watch lunch time TV and will make a point not to.

Thanks to Pascale, by the way, for joining me in Kate Spadedom and to Paula for emailing me to tell me about the church pastor who started the craze where if you had an ungrateful, uncharitable or whiny thought you pinged a bracelet on your wrist then had to swap it to the other wrist.

The aim was to keep the bracelet on the same wrist for 30 days.

A lot of people ended up with very sore wrists.

Still, whining is just a habit and the good thing about habits is that at least you can change them even if you do have to go to rehab but even so (1) you might make friends with someone famous while you're there and (2) a change is as good as a rest.

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As a writer who works from home, is published respectably around the world, has a lovely husband, a cute dog, some really nice clothes and a lot of travel, people often tell me what a wonderful life I am leading. And when I look at it on paper, they're right. So why then, I wondered, as 2011 drew to a close, am I not the happiest person alive? I have every reason to be but instead I am plagued with worry: that I'm not a good enough writer, that I have an increasingly wobbly muffin top, that two glasses of wine is a crime, that my office is a mess, that I've offended every Tom, Dick and Harry with whom I have ever crossed paths, that I'm over-looked, under-valued, under-rated, overwhelmed...you name it and I'm worried about being over or under it.

Well, it has to stop.

There's no point in everyone else appreciating my life if I can't quite manage it myself.

So, my mission for 2012 is to stop worrying so much and in a bid to achieve this in a practical way, I've come up with a plan. I came up with this plan, by the way, while lying awake in the middle of the night worrying about how much I worry.

My plan is called The Double Happy Project and here's how it works.

From now on, for every negative thought I have, I'm going to try to quickly come up with two positive thoughts. In doing so, I'm hoping to redress the worry balance and end up not under or over anything but rather dancing happily in the middle.

How to apply this philosophy?

I was worrying the other day, for example, about my nearly-finished book, The Uncommon Courtesy of Sugar Honey Wallace, not being good enough. (Writers do this a lot, by the way.)

But instead of gnawing on this worry until it had eaten a hole in my confidence the size of the moon, I quickly reminded myself that (1) I have written seven other novels which are all perfectly fine so there is no reason why the eighth wouldn't be too and (2) I do have a lovely husband and a new Kate Spade dress.

Amazingly, quickly moving on to the fun stuff in your head does seem to halt the progress of the bad stuff.

It's an ongoing process, of course. I've had to remind myself of (1) and (2) many times since then but the Kate Spade dress won't always be new. However, I have ordered another one online in the sale which should arrive any day now.

Thoughts?

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I try, believe me, I try. But somehow I seem to have a novel to write, two weekly columns, a monthly column, two Facebook pages, two blogs and a Twitter account to maintain. No wonder I am collapsed on my bed watching the second series of True Blood on DVD most the time. It's too much, I tell you. Too much! How can I be having a life interesting enough to blog about when most of it is spent hunched over my computer TYPING. In case you didn't know already, TYPING IS NOT INTERESTING. Luckily for me, I am at least a fast typist. Anyway, the big change for me in 2011 has been editing the Travel Page in New Zealand Woman's Day magazine. Many of the stories are written from my own backlog of experiences but I've also recently travelled to China, Australia and Fiji so if you're feeling sorry for me about all the typing, um, don't. Travelling is my happy place, and now I have worked out how to post my travel stories from Woman's Day on my website, so after a couple more episodes of watching Sookie get jiggy with Vampire Bill then maybe I will link them somehow to Facebook and Twitter and my life will be perfect.
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