What a day!

It’s done. Forget the Rules is live, launched, the site is up, the video is stream­ing, it’s live on 3 phones and, I assume, aired on Chan­nel [V] this after­noon and was repeated at 9.30pm.

I am exhausted. I am also very drunk.

I have to say for the record: crystal_storm was astound­ing and fabulous.

I star­ted this morn­ing in Sydney, having flown there last night after a friend’s wed­ding. We did the Sydney launch at Fox Stu­dios, a big, cold, cor­por­ate affair man­aged mainly by 3 Mobile’s pub­li­city folks, with a few ten­sions over what should happen and how, but it went off, in the end, with great enthu­si­asm from Smash Hits and Scene Magazine, and Roulla, a woman I know from years ago, who will do a story on it for icon in the SMH. After boast­ing they had 25 journ­al­ists coming and telling us that we had to be tame about our con­tent due to the sens­ib­il­it­ies of the main­stream media, we were amused to real­ise later that all the media who actu­ally showed were there for us and were invited by Jack.

We went straight from there to the air­port for a 1pm flight back. I sens­ibly deman­ded our exec­ut­ive producer/writer buy two dozen Krispy Kreme donuts for the Mel­bourne launch. Grabbed a taxi and went to the set for the Mel­bourne launch. Hung our fab­ulous banner over the bal­cony (I’m so chuffed with how it looks. Hope someone got a pic of it! If not, we’ll have to rehang it and stage the shot.) Mel­bourne launch was intim­ate but had a great feel to it. My friend Dan, who’s now the Enter­tain­ment Writer for The Age, was there and will do a piece for us. The Film Vic people were lovely, we all ate donuts and drank red wine. Watched the epis­odes, which are just fant­astic. Applauded the superb cast (I love Daniel, who plays Pony. Whenever he noticed me stress­ing today, he just hugged me or made some com­ment to put me at my ease. He rocks.)

Then (crazy, insane, nuts) went and lec­tured and gave a tute, thus miss­ing out on the launch party I organ­ised. Appar­ently it was fab­ulous. I’m really kick­ing myself over that one. I’d toyed with the idea of get­ting Dale to take my class and then never got around to organ­ising it.

Had a down moment after class when I tried to go back to the tail-end of the party and every­one had gone home, but then Jim dropped me off to Denn, near home, where I had Penne Put­tan­esca and San­giovese fol­lowed by rasp­berry gelati and muscat, and read the Riddle­mas­ter’s Game and slowly relaxed.

There are still things to do, little tweaks and follow-ups, but the hurdle is leapt. And now, sleep. Sweet, sweet sleep.