My deadline's approaching

But suddenly there are SO many other things to do!

About ten months ago I bragged to my friend T, ‘I’ve got nearly a year to write this next novel.’

‘Oh, acres of time,’ she said, and we both started laughing because every single time I say this. And then something happens to the passage of time, and instead of ten months behaving like ten actual months, life accelerates and before I know it my deadline is ALMOST UPON ME and I literally have no idea how that happened.

I could have written an entire book by now! Instead, what have I actually done?

Sat around boasting to my friends that I have nearly a year to write a book.

Cleaned the kitchen floor a lot (I only ever clean the kitchen floor when there’s urgent work to be done).

Doodled a few notes about characters etc.

Done some daft drawings, like this:

But seriously, work avoidance is a real problem. This week I glimpsed something on Instagram, where a young person was talking about ‘having procrastination.’ Like it’s a condition you can’t do anything about.

Here’s an imaginary email conversation with my editor, who’ll soon be expecting delivery of my book:

Ed: Hi Fiona, just wondering if you’ll be submitting this week?

Me: Hi, sorry, I was going to but I have procrastination!

Ed: Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Anything I can help with?

Me, thinking: Give me a new brain? When you see me washing the floor, literally tear the mop from my clammy grip and drag me out of the kitchen?

Trouble is, when there’s something important to be done, so many other things force their way up your priority list, thus pushing the genuinely urgent thing to the bottom. Things like:

Changing bed * cleaning disgusting ‘bits’ out of cutlery drawer * eating crackers (dry, as if to self-punish) * watching ginger cat on garden wall * wiping out fridge * making unnecessarily complicated dinners involving hours of shopping & prep

And my favourite: rearranging the potatoes in the vegetable rack.

But of all of those things, it’s those complex dinners that are the weirdest. To illustrate:

Non-deadline dinner = something simple like fish and rice. No shopping required. On table in 15 mins max.

Deadline dinner = grand feast comprising complicated main and three different sides, plus dessert, necessitating excursions to four separate speciality food stores, and the sourcing of dried mango powder, sorrel and black garlic, and much pounding with pestle and mortar.

The only time I use the pestle and mortar is when I’m on deadline. Mostly, it just sits there being annoyingly heavy and ignored on the shelf. Then work pressure mounts and I start to panic, and rather than tackling my workload I’m shaking the spiders out of the mortar (or is it the pestle?) and grinding caraway seeds for my essential home-made flatbreads!

When I’m not on deadline, our flatbreads come from the corner shop.

And there is no grinding of anything. Because, you know, in 2024 powdered spices etc are available. Yet when pressure mounts, I go all olden-days artisanal in the kitchen with the home-grinding and start wondering, ‘I wonder how hard it is to make mead?’

One time, when I had a single day to write the last four chapters of a book, I decided to make my own baked vegetable crisps and considered harvesting sea salt from the actual sea.

Why does this happen? What makes us go all Middle Ages when there’s urgent stuff to be done? I think we only have ‘an attack of the procrastination’ when the thing we’re avoiding is actually quite difficult to do.

I hesitate to say writing is hard, because I love it and it’s not difficult in the way that, say, removing a tiny pebble from a dog’s large intestine is difficult. I mean, it’s not life-or-death difficult.

It’s not even physically hard, like tiling a roof or building a motorway or swimming the English Channel covered in grease.

Even so, I’m not quite ready to get started as the tea towel drawer needs cleaning out urgently.

Love,

Fiona xx

PS: Happily, my forthcoming novel is not only finished but being released very soon! You can order The Woman Who Ran Away From Everything here! The book I’m working on right now WHEN I CAN PUT THE BLOODY MOP AWAY is the one after that. Yes, it all happens so very far ahead, and perhaps this is why time becomes distorted?

PPS: Also, in further happy news, my summer hit The Man I Met on Holiday is just a teeny 99p in ebook right now, and you can order here!