Penguin Australia

Treacle and Tahini Procrastination Cookies

/ Edwina Shaw / 3 Comments

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.

HOPE!

/ Edwina Shaw / 2 Comments

We writers need as much of this as we can get. Us senstivie artistic types have to somehow develop a skin thick enough to withstand the multiple rejections and endless waiting of the writing life.

Had a little gift of hope from the writing gods yesterday in the form of a surprise email from Ben Ball, publisher at Penguin Australia. He thought I’d rung (I hadn’t) and told me to call again today so we could talk. Did, he’s out, but still… I’ve sent an email asking if perhaps he’d be interested in reading the Cambodian novel ms, “Bittersweet”.

He’s a great guy. I was lucky enough to have an editorial consultancy with him on Thrill Seekers and he tried very hard to get it over the line at Penguin but it was short stories then and “not literary” enough. In contrast to “Bittersweet” being “too literary” for Hachette. Hmmm.

Hopefully I’ll find just the right balance with the next one.

Hope is important I’ve decided. Even false hope. That dream of one day being a best-selling author, may not come true, but it’s a lovely way to spend day-dreaming time. Beisdes, JK Rowling had that same dream. So did Ernie Hemingway, so did Margaret Atwood.

I have to hope that if I only persist and perist and persist, all the practice I’m getting in that time will make my work so good it’s irresistible!

Love and HOPE to all