Procrastination

I was going to refer to is as an ugly word, but no word is really that ugly in itself. Some will probably try and point out that ugly itself is ugly, but that is merely spelling.

Yes, I have been procrastinating with my writing. Only two posts since I moved to a new house at the beginning of April, but be that as it may, I have been distracted by other things. Work aside, I have been working on a project that I first began in 2011. Since moving to a new house and unpacking, I have been able to retrieve things that were stored for about eighteen months. Along with watching some TV, I slightly redesigned the project. Now that one of the items has been finished, I need to get on with some basic photography so I can share it.

As to the rest of my writing, well, I have certainly not been as enthusiastic about it as I know I can be. Maybe I need to set more stringent timelines. Or have someone become my whip-cracker to make sure I get a certain number of words, scenes or chapters to them by a certain time.

I did put myself under a little bit of pressure when I asked a friend if she’d take a pre-beta read of a book I’ve re-written since it was first released in 2008. Now I have to get on with and make the adjustments I wanted to make, for the third time.

There is nothing wrong with procrastinating. Sometimes we need time away from our works-in-progress, and sometimes they simply need time away from us. To allow them to ferment in the backs of our minds. They need time to grow. Time to improve. Time to do their own thing. Time for the characters to decide what they’re going to do, or even what they’re going to tell me to do.

Yes, life gets in the way of a good story, which is usually why we procrastinate. Go with it. Don’t beat yourself up over the fac that haven’t written for a few days, weeks or months. Once story I worked on had a hiatus of about eight years before it was finished. Thankfully the time between starting a story and finishing it is now considerably less. Life still gets in the way. For me it’s mostly work. I don’t have children, or even grand-children (I am old enough for those now). My days off are usually filled with helping my mum. At the moment, there is a focus on the new house; garden, back patio, pathways around the house. she is very house proud and I’m sure it’s killing her that the front of the house hasn’t been landscaped yet. We will get there, and it is going to be tougher for us as it’s now winter her in Australia. The rain is good to soften the dirt, which makes it easier to dog, but we end up with as much stuck to our shoes as that being moved.

Back to my writing. I never stop writing. Contradictory to what I have been talking about, but we never really ever stop writing. Our minds are always going over the stories we haven’t finished, regardless if we write down the thoughts or not, they are still happening. We continue to think. continue to create. Continue to write.

Allow the time away from physically writing to allow your mind to ruminate over your ideas. Put them in a vat with a few other ingredients and let them ferment. How long you do that for is absolutely relative to you. There is no rule to say that you must have them in the vat for three weeks, four days and seventeen hours. It could be anywhere from five minutes to five years. The result will still be the same; they story you want to put to paper.

Write, write, write. Oh, and don’t forget to procrastinate from time to time.