I was going to start this post by saying, ‘here’s my favourite joke about writers’, but actually it would be more honest to begin with, ‘here is the only joke about writers that I know’. (Please feel free to add yours to the comments section.)

Anyway:

Why don’t writers look out of the window in the morning?
Because then they’d have nothing to do in the afternoon.

I know, I know, hardly worth the wait. But writers will grimace with recognition when they hear it, because it is oh, so easy to procrastinate. I don’t suffer from writer’s block, but I do suffer from writer’s faff. I’ll get on with the book when I’ve cleared my inbox. When I’ve taken all of the dead knitting patterns off my hard drive. When I’ve audited the contents of my makeup drawer. It’s crazy, because I love to write: it satisfies me, it makes me happy, and even though every time I finish a project I promise myself a a month off, I rarely last more than a fortnight before I’m back at the keyboard.

I try to spot when I’m procrastinating, and then I take a deep breath, sidestep the distraction, and head for the page. But when I went to the studio in the middle of last week with the rewrite of ‘Surrounded By Water’ in mind, I realised I had some none-procrastinating tidying to do.

Here’s my desk, Before.

And here’s After:

Time well spent, I think.

My plan is to be finished by the end of June, so I am eschewing spinning and sewing until then, and writing 1500 words per day.

And looking forward to looking out of the window, in the afternoons.