Edwina Shaw

Here’s my remedy for the plague of procrastination.

Procrastination makes you sick. The cupboard maybe cleaner than ever before, the bathroom tiles scrubbed, the garden weeded, but that novel manuscript, poem, essay or short story is still there, ugly as ever, waiting for you to stop farting around and get back to it.

All those other little jobs that suddenly seem so much more important, distract for a little while but all the time, at the back of your mind, lurks the spectre of the writing you should be doing. The longer you take getting back to it, the harder it is and the sicker the feeling in your stomach.

Here’s my proposed cure. It worked for me!

Edwina’s Treacle and Tahini Procrastination Cookies

INGREDIENTS

120 gms butter

1/2 cup dark brown sugar

2 tablespoons treacle

1 cup self-raising flour

1 cup almond meal

1/2 cup tahini

1 egg

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

METHOD

Preheat oven to 180 degrees (350 F). Line a tray with baking paper

In a medium bowl, cream the butter and sugar. Mix in egg, then add treacle and tahini till well blended. Add flour, almond meal, cinnamon and cloves and mix.

Make small balls of dough and place on tray. Bake until golden brown. Cool on a rack.

MOST IMPORTANT STEPS

Make cup of tea or coffee

Turn on the computer

Sit down and open feared file

WRITE AT LEAST 200 WORDS (anything will do)

Now you can eat a cookie!

No more procrastinating. Bake the biscuits, face the fear, and use all that sugary energy to write away the urkiness of avoiding what needs to be done.

Okay, enough procrastinating for me. The manuscript calls.

PS. Just submitted the first forty pages to the Varuna/Penguin scholarship award. Fingers crossed.

Happy Reading

Writer envy starts early. You pick up a book in the bookstore, read the first page and think, “I could do better than that!”

And so you probably can. However, after spending all that time glued to your seat writing and rewriting and sending your masterpiece out, you realise the publishers who liked that book you picked up all those years ago (yes, it’s take years) aren’t interested in what you’ve got to offer.

Writer envy starts to niggle in your gullet.

Then it happens, someone from your writing group, or worse, someone from your family, gets published while your manuscript is still languishing on slush piles. Envy turns into more than a niggle, it starts to burn like poison in your guts. It tastes bitter.

It’s at this point you have a choice. You can let that bitterness flavour every book you read. “I could do better.” “I’ll never be able to write that well.” “I’ll never ever get published.” Or you can choose to believe that the success of others brings you closer to your own.

Envy can be a good spur to action (it got you started in the first place didn’t it?) but is a very poor master. It corrodes your writerly esteem and tarnishes the dream.

Let go of envy and try to share in the joy of the success of others. If they did it, then it’s possible for you too. When your turn at publication comes, do you want to feel that others are tearing you down, or that they are happy for you?

It all boils down to that old chestnut, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

In other words, GET OVER IT!

Be happy that someone else has achieved their dream, because it proves they can come true.

Then reading can be fun again.

It’s not a game of compare and contrast. It’s not a competition.

We can only write what we write and each of us has something unique to offer. Equal but different.

So, if you want to look as happy reading as the woman in the picture, let go of the angst of envy, and read for pleasure, not to find fault. Share in the success of others, be happy for them.

Don’t you love the little mouse?

I wonder if mice feel envy? “She found a bigger piece of cheese.” “His hole is bigger than mine.”

Somehow I think not. They probably just share.

Maybe that’s the opposite of envy – sharing?

Share this:

Share this: