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Every day, every day, every day I write the book

There's a lovely piece in the Guardian Review, yesterday, about writers and their relationship with procrastination: "Procrastinators are particularly tortured by people who don't delay." it says before going on to outline how F Scott Fitzgerald - a classic work avoider - would deliberately try to distract Hemingway.

He'd do anything to distract him, so the story goes, shouting up at his window and asking how the work was going, trying to lure him down for drinks.
There are perhaps three questions a writer, especially a work avoidence grrl like me, dislike. I'm risking getting friends asking them deliberately now but, anyway, they are:
  • Where do you get your ideas from?
    Well, if I knew that, I'd sell the secret ideas lodestone to all the other writers, wouldn't I?
  • What's it about?
    I heard that far too often over the last six months and have actually run out of ways of giving the pitch without boring myself to tears. It's about stuff, OK? Stuff and things.
  • Have you finished it?
    Trust me, when it's all finished, you won't have to ask. I'll be the very drunk person lounging about and doing stuff like, I don't know, not switching the PC on for a week.

I am that close to the heady rush towards publication. I long to be in the final niggly arguments about specific words. But I am suffering a crisis in self-trust which has me convinced the entire thing is tedious rubbish that no-one wants to actually read. If only there were a Hemingway I could drag out to the pub instead.

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Posted @ 4:22 pm on Sunday, January 23, 2005
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