Tag Archives: Procrastination

The month that was, the month to come

06 Wednesday Mar 2019

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Phew! February was the month of book launches. I had my own launch on 17 February, you can read about that here. I also attended three others: a novel, Small Blessings, by Emily Brewin, on 13 February; a poetry collection, Palmistry, by Chris Ringrose, on 23 February; and a collection of poems and photographs, Blue Milonga, by Edward Caruso on 28 February.  That’s not even counting the one I couldn’t make because my band were playing a gig. 

I don’t think I’ve ever been to so many launches in my whole life, let alone in a single month. Perhaps there’s something in the water at the moment. Each one was different, as were the books themselves, but all involved the signing table, and schmoozing of guests. Emily’s launch had the most wine, while mine had the best catering (if I do say so myself).

March is shaping up to be intense as well. To begin with, Wasted Monday are trying out a new drummer, hopefully we all agree that the relationship works and we have a full band again. Lu and I will be doing open mics around town to keep our performance skills up until the drummer is ready to join us.

I’m also moving house at the end of March. I recently made the bold, and terrifying, decision to purchase an apartment, so I now have the joys of mortgage repayments to look forward to instead of rent. At least this time I have enough notice to plan my move.

It’s also the time at work when we have an external body come to audit us, so that’s shaping up to be a pretty busy time.

My writing has suffered a bit as a result of all the stuff I’ve been doing. I’m trying to get myself back into a good writing practice but am very good at finding excuses. I have purchased, but not yet started reading, The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield, which is specifically about the tendency to procrastinate when attempting to do a large, long term project like writing a novel. Hopefully I’ll get around to reading it soon and it will give my a burst of renewed enthusiasm.

Things are ticking along. With a hectic last month and another hectic month approaching I hope that I’ll be able to make time for some productive writing work, apart from my morning pages which are going well. I look forward to keeping you all informed.

Follow the Leader

18 Monday Jun 2018

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Last week I attended a three-day leadership conference in Sydney, hosted by McKinsey & Company. I was nominated by one of the General Managers at work, and they paid for my travel and accommodation. It was 300+ people from all over Australia and from a variety of companies all coming together to learn how to be better leaders.

I’ve struggled with the idea of feeling like a leader. Ever since high-school I’ve been in positions of leadership, both at work and in the community. I tell myself stories about why; I was the only choice, no one else would do it, whoever made the decision didn’t know I wasn’t qualified.

I want to stop telling myself those stories. I want to believe I deserve these roles. At the closing of the conference participants were asked to talk about what they would be taking home. I stood up and said I need to re-frame my idea of ‘leader’. I have often had people in my life for whom I acted as an advocate. I have had people in my life who were willing to do what I suggested. I’ve had people who followed me, and I feel a responsibility to those people. This is a big part of what makes me a leader – taking due care of the people who are following me, relying on me, trusting me to take care of them. I use my strength, my skills, my energy to help others.

My mother has had numerous positions of leadership throughout her life and I think she feels much the same as I do. I’m proud of her, she has set an excellent example of leadership and community service. The roles she’s had have made me more comfortable accepting the roles I’ve been given.

Sometimes I wish I could give up my ‘day job’ and make money off my creative stuff, but there are parts of it that energise my other pursuits. I learn new skills, I develop new networks, I earn a living so that when my writing, or performance, don’t make any money I’m not resentful or stressed out.

The biggest lessons I took from the conference were about leading myself. They were things I can do to be a better leader, but also a better person. So I’m now going to try to focus on three things:

  • Eat that frog (stop putting off the hard stuff)
  • Be present (do one thing at a time)
  • Be kind (to myself first and to others)

It feels wanky using my blog to talk about this stuff, probably because I’m still not 100% comfortable, but as one of the participants said to me afterwards : ‘You are a natural leader. It’s time to take the next step.’

Sixth Time Lucky

02 Saturday Dec 2017

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This year I finished my NaNoWriMo on 28 November. My final word-count was 50,336 words.

The working title of my new book is ‘The Discovery of the Franklin’.Cover mockup
I mocked-up this cover while procrastinating doing my words one day.

The story is contemporary fiction with romantic elements. The main characters are sisters, Sarah and Katie Franklin, hence the title.

It needs a bit of work to make it a proper book; I ‘pantsed’ the plot.

As well as NaNoWriMo, November was a time of moving away from creative endeavours which weren’t serving me. I decided it was time to leave the band that I’d been playing with. I’m  jamming with some new people, so we’ll see where that goes.

I also decided to stop going to my weekly writing workshop. The criticism that I got from the workshop group, and from the teacher, really demotivated me. I tried to take it on board and incorporate it, but it was never enough. Criticism, like art, can be extremely subjective.

I have a lot of creative energy which wants to get out, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to expend it on stuff which isn’t bringing me joy. Things don’t have to last forever, and I’ve changed as I’ve gotten older.

Now I’m going to work on setting my new year goals, and take stock of whether I’ve achieved last year’s.

Productivity Hacks – What are yours?

18 Monday Sep 2017

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Yesterday I was at the monthly Melbourne Romance Writers’ Guild meeting. We had special guest Anna Campbell come to speak to us about writing through the fear. Anna is a full time writer and she had a lot of great tips for making the most of your writing time.

One of the things which really stood out for me was the use of a productivity diary. It can be anything, but it’s somewhere to record the work you’ve done on your writing. One of the other participants suggested using Excel and the nerd in me was very excited. After the meeting I came home and made a spreadsheet:

Writing Tracker pic

It’s pretty simple, but it’s a way to keep you grounded about how much you’re actually producing. Anna said she was always surprised by how much she wrote when she looked back over her productivity diary. She said that a lot of her struggles with writing are based around ‘demons’ who tell her she isn’t good enough. Having a record of the writing she did over the month means she can tell the demons to get stuffed. I don’t know if it’ll work for me, but I’ll give it a try.

I’ve also started to think about what to do for NaNoWriMo this year. I’m going to use Lauren Clarke’s The Novel Handbook which I bought from her at the Romance Writers of Australia conference in mid-August. I found that with my last manuscript I was struggling to keep the characters straight in my head, to remember their eye colours, favourite foods etc. A story bible (try this one) like the productivity diary,  can be in whatever format suits you, but the purpose is to keep character, setting, and plot stuff handy so that you can refer to it.

As I was going through editing the manuscript I realised that I’d changed the names of three different minor characters. I got to a section, fairly late in the novel, and thought ‘Who is George?’ He was the main character’s father, originally named Ben. There were also two Renees.

The phrase ‘be ruthless in protecting your writing time’ has come up a number of times over the last month for me, and it’s really brought home the need for me to be disciplined. I’m good at sprinting, doing a lot of work over a relatively short period of time, but I haven’t developed a good sustainable pattern. I’ve blocked out Monday’s in my calendar for writing, and I am going to be ruthless about not booking other things during that time.

I’m going overseas at the start of October for three weeks. I’m taking a laptop with me so I hope that I’ll make some time to write. I’m going to take my Choose Your Own Adventure story with me; I’d like to have that edited by the time I get home. It might be fun just to put that up on the internet for people to read.

What are some of your techniques for squeezing out more writing time? Making use of dead time, not falling down a Netflix/YouTube hole, and doing short bursts, even if they’re only ten minutes, were all ways that I thought I might be able to scrounge some more time for writing.

The Business of Creating

29 Sunday Nov 2015

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Last night I managed to get to the 50,000 word target of my fourth year of NaNoWriMo. Huzzah! I was so pleased to have been able to get it done, two days early, and with only a couple of thousand words worth of story to go. I’m going to wrap it up today and tomorrow and then put it away for a little while to stew.

NaNo-2015-Winner-Badge-Large-Square.jpg

I’ve had some conversations in the last little while about my plan for the future. The only problem is I don’t really have a well thought out and detailed plan. What I want is a job that I like well enough, that’s part-time so that I can do my creative stuff on the side, and possibly one day I’ll get a job where I can use my writing skills, but maybe not. That’s the plan.

At the moment I have a job placement which is three days per week doing Human Resources. It’s a refreshing change from the basic office admin job placements I’ve been doing recently so I’m really enjoying getting stuck in. It’s only until the end of the year though, and then I’ll be back to looking for ongoing work.

So here’s the new plan. Starting from now I’m going to work one day per week on my writing. Now that NaNoWriMo is finished for the year I really need to start doing something with my older manuscripts. The one I wrote last year, in particular, needs a whole bunch of structural edits and additional sections.

I’m going to do what I’ve heard other professional authors do, for example Dawn French and Fiona McIntosh, that is set myself a proper 9am to 5pm day of work for my writing. In the morning I will spend my time researching writing opportunities, applying for jobs, finding writing competitions, magazines and periodicals and blogs that are taking submissions and do that. This will be my time to work on this blog. I will also look into networking possibilities in the industry and short courses in writing that I might like to do.

In the afternoon I’m just going to write (and rewrite). I’m going to start with the manuscript from last year’s NaNoWriMo, which needs some big stuff done to it, and spend a couple of hours a week just going through it and fixing it. Editing has never been my strong suit, I’ve always be much more interested in coming up with new material, but I must spend the time revising and reworking. Maybe I’ll set myself a deadline of the end of January to have it done and I can start sending it to publishers.

Some of you may have noticed that that only adds up to four days work. You’re right, and the other day I’m going to keep for my band. We meet once a week usually, and rehearse for 4 or 5 hours. That takes up most of one day of the weekend. I will spend some of the time on the other weekday practicing and the rest of the day getting the chores and life admin stuff done that I would have done on the weekend. We’re also going to start looking for performance opportunities in the new year so I’ll schedule those in too.

My aim in this is to get myself into a routine. I’m not studying anymore and I hope to have a solid, ongoing job by early next year. It’s time to get serious about the business of creating and make sure that going back to uni was not just a frivolous escape from being at work.

Choose Your Own Adventure!

05 Thursday Nov 2015

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It’s November and that means it’s NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) time again. I got off to a slow start but I’m cracking along now. I have a very dull/not busy/not hard job at the moment and I’m able to do quite a lot of writing while I’m there. It makes the time go faster too. Double bonus!

On some sort of nostalgic whim I decided to write a Choose Your Own Adventure Novel. Remember those? All written in the second person, mostly targeted to tweens and teens, massively popular in the 80s and 90s. Well, I wanted to write one of those, and since I seem to write romance type novels, it’s a Choose Your Own Romance Adventure.

It's true, I have planned 20 failure endings and only 5 successful ones!

It’s true, I’ve planned 20 failure endings and only 5 successful ones!

It’s going great, once I got my head around keeping track of my loose ends. So far I have about nine thousand words and two failure endings. The biggest thing I had to get used to was that I now have to write sex scenes in the second person.

E.g. You run your hand along his jaw. He turns to you and kisses you deeply.

That sort of thing. At first it was very weird to write in second person, but I’m getting used to it. Every time I have to use you as plural, though, I tend to expand it to ‘you and Joe Bloggs do this’ because part of me thinks that You is the main character and therefore shouldn’t be confused with you plural.

Additionally one of my characters is called Felicity, which is apparently very hard to spell. There are going to be so many different misspellings of her name through the manuscript, but as is the motto of NaNoWriMo, write now, edit later. I’m also doing some of my writing on an iPad, which has a very strange and frustrating auto-correct system, so hopefully Future Me won’t be looking at a sentence and think what the hell? That’s not even English.

Anyway, just keeping you all updated. I might not be posting here much coz all of my words will be going to the novel, but you never know. Maybe I’ll be procrastinating.

Meandering Update Post

20 Tuesday Jan 2015

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Bah. I’ve been wanting to post something for a while but I just haven’t had the time or energy to really do it justice, so this is just a sort of spur of the moment brain purge.

The last couple of weeks I’ve been working a lot – doing full time hours for the first time in years and I’m finding myself feeling tired, lazy, uninspired and generally unproductive. I get that we all need money, and I do particularly because I can’t really work much while I’m studying and the government, in all their collective wisdom, don’t think I need welfare payments to stop me from starving while studying, but seriously. Full time work and I are not friends, but we have to just get along for the moment.

I’ve been working on my novel, slowly knocking out a thousand words a week or so, it’s coming along, I think it’s just about to climax and then there will just be the resolution and the first draft will be done. It will be nice to have it finished and I think I’m on track to have that by the time I go back to uni.

I’ve been practising my bass and jamming with my dudes. We recorded some of the songs we jammed last Saturday and they sound way less awesome played back than they do at the time, although perhaps that’s just how recording yourself works. But it’s still really early days for that so it’s all good. It totally sounds like, y’know, music, so that’s a bonus! I think they’re also on board for the performing in front of other people goal that I set myself for this year, so that’s amazing.

I was given some money at Christmas to put towards a photography course which I’m hoping get done before uni goes back, although I’ve hit a bit of a roadblock in the sense where I don’t really know what I want to focus on or what skill level the courses are pitched at. I suspect I’m just procrastinating the decision – I should get onto that. Other photography capers have included taking my camera to see some bands and then having an excuse to talk to the bands after to say ‘Hey I was that person with my lens in your face, would you like me to send you photos?’. It works quite well actually, I get to chat to some lovely people, they get a couple of cool shots of them on stage, everyone wins!

And of course on top of all of that I’ve been trying to keep in touch with my friends and y’know be sociable and stuff. So all in all I’m pretty busy, pretty happy, and while not being as productive creatively as I would like to be, still getting a fair amount of stuff done.

After starting this post feeling like I’m not getting anything done, I’m now feeling more like I’m getting bits of a lot of different things done a bit at a time and so, while I might feel like time is slipping away (how is it 2015?!) I’m not idle and it will all work out in the end.

Multi-disciplinary art

22 Monday Dec 2014

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According to a guy I was talking to on an online dating website, Joni Mitchell used to think of creativity as being like crop rotation. If you worked in more than one artistic discipline there would be periods where you would spend a lot of time on one form and the others would lie fallow, as it were. You would ride the crests and troughs of each type of art so that they would each have time to mature and regenerate between periods of high productivity.

I’ve been feeling bad about the amount of time I’ve spent on the novel I started for NaNoWriMo this year since November finished. I made it through the challenge, and I won, but since it’s been December I’ve written very little. The reason I guess I’m feeling a bit guilty about it, is that the story isn’t finished.

I don’t like the fact that the story isn’t finished. It niggles at my brain but I’ve been really really not feeling like writing. I know this isn’t surprising, NaNoWriMo is not a sustainable way of writing, and the last two times I’ve done it, I’ve finished the work within the month. I’ve never had this feeling of unfinishedness hanging over me.

There are other contributing factors too. I’m not studying currently because it’s not semester time, and since I’m a full-time student these days I don’t have a ‘proper job’ so I’m sort of not really doing anything which means I’m floating around and floating around feels directionless and feeling directionless is a bit of a vicious cycle in which you feel like you don’t achieve anything so you then don’t feel motivated to achieve anything and therefore don’t achieve anything. I think you can all see what I’m getting at.

I have been spending a significant amount of time on my bass guitar playing, so that’s good. And I’m sure it being right before Christmas isn’t helping with the generally weird feeling of forced frivolity either. I don’t really know what this post is trying to say but y’know, maybe I’ll take myself on a photowalk tomorrow or write a couple of thousand words and then I’ll feel a bit more like I’ve done something.