Procrastination by Margot Justes

Editing a manuscript is not for the faint of heart.  I've been working on my novella for far too long and have barely made any headway.

This weekend is free and I planned to spend it in my office, but I decided to bake bread  instead. Anything to delay the editing. It's called procrastination and I'm really, really good at it.

Next, laundry beckons, maybe pasta sauce is on the agenda today, grating cheese to go with the pasta, have to go food shopping to get the ingredients, and in the process I had a few cups of coffee already, and cleaned my office. You get the drift, anything else but writing.

Now I'm tired and out of things I'm willing to do, and it’s still morning. Novella awaits,  and I’m looking for other things to do. Anything to postpone sitting down at my desk and staring down a blank page. The sheer terror of silent characters.

I’m going through a dry spell, writer’s block, whatever you call it, I’m in it.

The next step for me that usually works is re-reading the manuscript, and get back into the story and the characters, and catch up with their lives. That is what I intend to do after I have a couple more cups of coffee. The other option that sometimes works, is to start another project, and set aside the silent ‘family feud’ in my current WIP.

As a writer, I should be used to this, it has happened before, and will happen again-yet it is something that I have never quite gotten used to.

I have dust bunnies in my living room, time to go downstairs and dust...I never thought cleaning would be preferable to writing...wait, it isn’t.  On the other hand, I usually come up with some terrific dialog while cleaning.

Procrastination is an effective tool to a clean house.

Cheers,

Margot  Justes

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www.mjustes.com