Procrastination Blues by Kelex

My mother bought me a Garfield poster when I was a senior in high school. You might've seen it before. Says, "I'll procrastinate tomorrow."

This is the underlying theme of my life.

How I've ever completed a single book is beyond me. I remember when I told that same woman above that I was going to write a book. She lifted a brow, said, "Sure you are" and chuckled to herself. You should've seen her face when a few weeks later, I had a completed manuscript.

No, no, no... you should've seen her face when a PUBLISHER actually sent me an acceptance email for that manuscript.

But I digress...

More than 100 published titles later, and I'm sitting here writing this instead of the book that was supposed to be done two weeks ago. I've spent the last few days doing EVERYTHING ELSE I can think of doing instead of write this flipping book.

And the story I'm working on is AWESOME... at least, the idea of it is, since I haven't finished the damned thing. I've already written some scenes that have literally brought tears to my eyes... (Which happens infrequently, btw... I've had readers tell me they've cried during certain books and I was like, "really?" So I know if something made ME tear up, then my readers are gonna be reaching for the Kleenex.)

Yeah, I often go on tangents. Distraction is my middle name, which causes procrastination...

Given months to do a project, I will wait until there are only a few days to do months worth of work. If I ask for an extension, I will find more time to procrastinate. I pushed a deadline back and spent yesterday making pretty book covers for other authors instead of writing. Seriously.

I do my best work under pressure. No pressure, I'm likely not working. I thrive on deadlines. Some of my best work is done under duress. I have literally written 30,000-40,000 words in a matter of 3-4 days. Just ask my editor.

The stories are all there, up in the noggin. Ready to come out. I can just be lazy AF.

Thankfully for me, I write quickly. My best day ever, I wrote almost an entire short novella in two days. A little over 14,000 words in ONE DAY. I wrote another 7,000 words the following day and after a quick read-through/self-edit, subbed it by that evening to my editor.

(For those who aren't familiar with word counts, but familiar with my stories... the bulk of my work is between 20,000 and 40,000 words, or novella length.)

 Of course, 14K in a day is NOT the norm. I decent day is 3-5K. A great day is pushing 10. 

But then there's a downside to writing quickly.  I push myself to meet a deadline  -- and then I crash. I'll spend a day or two as a vegetable, unable to do much more than binge watch something on Netflix and let my brain reset.

Which only leads to more procrastination.

It's a vicious friggen cycle.

Okay, I've wasted enough time now.

Back to the words... (who am I kidding?)

Kelex is the author of over 100 titles, all published with TEP. Her work can be found HERE. Her book, Predator (Project Zed, 6) is coming soon... we hope... (*wink*)