Eve Gaddy: Procrastination Redux

Yes, I've talked about procrastination before. But since I'm procrastinating again it seemed like a good time to write another blog about it.:)

I'm sure there's a very good, subconscious reason for procrastination. For instance, last night, instead of writing (which I hadn't been doing all day because I was, you guessed it, procrastinating) I flipped on the TV to the show Nashville. No, I don't watch Nashville but something caught my eye so I started watching the last ten or fifteen minutes of the episode. And I heard a song that I not only love but that is a great song for the playlist of my current book. Fate. Or magic. Or maybe kismet. It's called Longer by Clare Bowen and Sam Palladio. Here's the link. http://bit.ly/1IDRdvA . I also post a song for the day on my social media sites and this is a brand new song I can post. Good thing all around, right?

See, there was something in the air that told me to watch it because I needed a song that will drop me right into my story. When you are highly distractible a trigger song is very helpful. And yes, I'm highly distractible. Where was I? Oh, yes, procrastination.

Today I found I couldn't write a scene until I knew a particular word one of the characters would use. (A twenty-eight year old cowboy and the word, I now know, is awesome.) Anyway, I had to email my friends, ask my kids and solicit suggestions on my Facebook author page for "the perfect word." Sometimes I'm able to write a word that's close and just make a note and come back to it. That might read something like this: good-looking (not exactly but sorta, more like hot but not that either, FIND WORD)

Yesterday it was the pool table. My characters are playing pool and I needed the perfect pool table. Very cool, over the top antique pool table. I found it fairly quickly but I wanted to be able to put that picture on the website for the new series that the story is a part of, and the only pictures of that table I've found are copyrighted. This involved an exhaustive look through the Internet and on a list of websites with royalty free images and that sort of thing. So far I haven't been able to find it.

Sometimes I simply don't want to do something so I procrastinate--I'm talking about writing mostly, but of course, it carries over to all facets of life. But very often I find there is a reason I can't do X, Y or Z and when I procrastinate I find out what that reason is.

Then there's the ultimate tool of procrastination. The Internet. Email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram... and one that's particularly addicting, Pinterest. Everyone knows that pinning pictures on Pinterest is a necessary part of a writer's creative process. Honest, it's not just procrastination. I really need to look at all those pictures of hot guys . . . After all, I write romance.