I remember years ago learning the old adage "procrastination is the thief of time." I never thought much about it until recently when I realised procrastination is one of my biggest faults I work under the theory why do today what you can put off until tomorrow? Boy is that true. It isn't as if I put off my writing: I love doing that so I can concentrate on my next book for hours but what I can't seem to do, unless pressed, is to do all the other things in life I should be doing instead.
Publicity for a start. Writers these days have to work on publicizing their books, especially when they work for an e-books publisher. It's not as if the readers can walk down the lines of books at Borders or Waterstones, picking up titles or covers they fancy and reading the blurb on the back before deciding whether to buy it or now. Now we have a plethora of different information at our fingertips via the internet and we have to make the effort and seek out the sort of books we like to read, aim for a specific author we've enjoyed before. This means writers have to be active on the net, keeping their blogs and websites up to date, tweeting, putting notes on face-book, making an effort to guests on other writers blogs, join yahoo reading groups, maybe set up a few adverts - the list is endless. For instance, I've been looking at my blog over the weeks as we inched toward Christmas, and thinking it was about time I wrote a new post. Then, after I'd been out buying presents, spent ages over writing my cards, planning food, it sort of slipped out of my mind and descended the to do list until it dropped conveniently off the end. So here I am at last and very apologetically, writing an entry two whole weeks after Christmas!!
I've never been one for New Year resolutions, mainly because my one and only resolution - to diet and get fitter never did actually achieve its aims. Admittedly I'm a few pounds lighter than I was at the beginning of last year, but for various reasons I'm no fitter. At this rate, with my automatic drop out facility in operation mode it will take me years and years to lose my excess poundage!! Instead of resolutions, which I break I've decided just to be rather more positive in life. So the aim is to keep my blog up to date at regular intervals, figure out how to update my website properly without asking for help, make more effort as far as publicity is concerned, and try to feed my family - if I can manage to fit that in as well. The washing and the megga tidying up I planned to do may well have to wait for a while, until it drops off the long list of course. Then, with luck I can forget about it altogether.
Next week I plan to do a retrospect on 2010, which will include something about the new book I'm working on, visits to muscials such as Wicked and concerts by Lee Mead and John Barrowman, and anything else I can think of.
