Mad Iguana

Raine, that’s fab news and so well deserved. Happy dancing for you!

Thank-you @thea. 🙂 Those comps produce some amazing stuff!

The Flower and the Bee (370 words)

We watch the open window, falling sunlight, a red flower and an amber bee. This is just the start. Remember that. This is Venus raining diamonds above the black horizon in a damson sky. You have begun to breath the sea and your skin is a map of evenings and the moon will always rise, remember that. When my hand…[Read more]

Editing
“Listen to me, Luigi; we’re always on the lookout for new stage plays and this one sounded interesting. Ingenious plot, bit of sex, incest, prostitution, a potential murder and ending up with a suicide.” He put down the cigar he had been waving like a conductor’s baton and folded his hands on his expansive belly. “What’s not to like?”
“…[Read more]

UNTITLED (437 words)

I don’t know where I am.
No, really, I don’t.
You’ll think I’m kidding when I tell you about this later and we’ll probably have a good laugh about it, but don’t be surprised if it takes more than one bottle of wine for me to get over today’s little episode. This whole thing at Moira’s Mystical Meditation is freaking me out…[Read more]

Thanks @philippaeast, there’s some good stuff in there isn’t there? Considering printing out a copy for when I start to query (a while away yet)

I so agree that it’s useful to drill down into the actual function of a particular behaviour (e.g. scrolling on Twitter, ironing socks etc.)

It MAY be avoidant procrastination (i.e. continuously putting off something we’re for some reason afraid to face). Or that same behaviour could be a much-needed and healthy break from the keyboard / page -…[Read more]

Great thread, Daeds, thanks

To be clear, the wiki definition, or the Oxford Dictionary, or Chambers, or whatever, is only the definition that whoever wrote the definition decided on. It’s useful as clarification or as a pointer if you really don’t know how to use the word. That said, even if it is wholly and exclusively correct* then the understanding of commitment remains…[Read more]

I think what writers commonly refer to as procrastination is not quite the same as that definition, anyway. Sometimes forcing yourself to write can be the worst thing for your writing, and doing something else can be what you need to get your head into the right place.

Or any kind of mental illness really. It’s always tenuous to believe individual behaviour can be reduced to a binary either/or thing. Especially other people’s behaviour. I guess the dictionary definition gives us an end result of a behaviour, but it tells us nothing about anything leading up to that end.

You ever meet anyone with any kind of attention deficit disorder Alan?

Wiki: Procrastination is defined as the avoidance of doing a task that needs to be accomplished.

It’s not the same as lack of preparedness, or planning, or simply taking time out to think, or refresh – it’s creative avoidance. It’s deciding other tasks are more important than the thing you claim to enjoy. And if you do that, you are uncommitted.

Yeah, ‘procrastination’ i think is simply needing a break from the direct *act* of writing to allow the mental part of it to catch up. It isn’t a flaw, or a failure. Given the number of successful, well established authors I see on Twitter telling themselves off for procrastinating, and yet still going on to publish successful books, I think we…[Read more]

Procrastination is nothing to do with commitment! It is everything to do with recognising that you need something completely different sometimes to get the authorly juices flowing again. I do it – it doesn’t mean I’m not committed at all.

I prefer to call it what it is and look at WHY I’m doing it. If it’s simply time-wasting, then I give myself…[Read more]

Yes, there is that. An idea that added a whole new dimension to one of my novels once came to me while I was laying the table for dinner.

Actually playing something like Freecell occupies the surface part of your brain and liberates the sub-conscious to do a lot of sorting out. Or something like that. My terminology is all wrong.