I have definitely spent this afternoon procrastinating. Procrastinating is bad.

To make this an edifying post I should share some words of wisdom on why all writers procrastinate from time to time and motivational learnings on how to overcome it. But I haven’t got any and can’t because the enemy won today. Even writing a blog post about procrastinating is procrastinating.

Having submitted an article this morning and knowing I had a couple of calls to make after 4pm I seemed to stall in the intervening hours – I call it the internet.

Instead of actually writing a short story, an interesting article, memoir or even some of my novel I’ve been catching up on my reading.

First up, US economist Paul Krugman, who I admire and always find interesting. His blog also leads his readers off to various other economic types who say interesting things about the US economy and current political milieu in the US, which can be pretty strange from an Australian point of view. It’s all quite fascinating but the state of monetary policy in the EU and the likely consequences for Spain are not helping me write an interesting short story for a literary journal or the soon to close Scarlett Stilletto competition, which is what I’m really stuck on.

Reading what other people have written is of course useful, but it does rather stop one from writing stuff that would be useful, if you want to be a freelance writer for instance that gets paid!

sigh

If you want to procrastinate this was interesting reading too, The Neon Boneyard in the current Griffith Review. This was good and I rather agree with this, although its from last week.