The Clockwork Weaver

Procrastination, Professionalism or Cowardice…

Posted on 12th September 2013

Since coming home from Crete and getting back into mundane swing of normal life I have done very little actual writing. There are a few reasons for this, ranging from crippling curiosity about how my prospective agents are getting on, to genuinely urgent work projects or home tasks, and, of course, procrastination.

Ah, procrastination! My mortal enemy. If it were not for you I would be the emperor of Northamptonshire… if not the world. Why does the insignificant always take on such a fascinating sheen when I should be embroidering a blank page with magic? Why am I drawn to frivolous diversions like a chubby, flightless moth to the intoxicating flame of distraction?

Who knows?

So, today I have:

1. Sent off another query to one other agent
2. Added a little widget to my Excel spreadsheet of agent queries which now counts how many replies I’ve had on each day of the week… (5 for Mondays and Tuesdays, 2 for Wednesdays, 3 for Thursdays and 1 for Friday, Saturday and Sunday)
3. Rejoined FirstWriter.com
4. Written this blog entry
5. Completed level 181 of Candy Crush
6. Made my twitter page look lovely – (The photo of the sky is from the Scillies, the land from Crete)
7. Spent a while looking up procrastination on the web… this is meta-procrastination.
8. Sorted out my seldom used apps on my iPad
9. Decided to do NaNoWriMo, so spent some time pondering what that novel should be about

Maybe 1 and 3 are prodding my writing career slightly forwards, but even though I’ve spent some time trying I don’t believe the others are. If I’d spent the time writing instead of doing these things perhaps I wouldn’t have got another rejection. This one from Gillie Russell at Aitken Alexander Associates. This rejection may have come out of cowardice though: I wimped out of writing that I’d chosen her because I thought she had kind eyes. So I’ll put this failure down to being too professional.

Related articles

• Strategic procrastination (alishasangle.com)
• The Joy of Procrastination (schoenduo.wordpress.com)
• Procrastination and Spanners (ishacrowe.wordpress.com)