My other half refuses to sit down at my computer any more because he can’t type using my keyboard. I guess, looking at this picture, I can understand why. I type so much, and probably a little too fast and too hard, with the tough fingernails I inherited from my mother, and the letters have worn off many of the keys. And this is the second keyboard I’ve been through in about a year.
I don’t usually notice because 95% of the time I touch type, but there are odd occasions …

I guess that most writers out there are avid readers. I know I certainly am, and that doesn’t just mean I read a lot, but that I acquire books like some people acquire bread and milk, and then I read these books in various rooms of the house at various times and basically make a widespread book mess. And yes, it drives my husband quite mad.
I thought it’d be interesting to do a quick survey of the house and find out where my current reads are. Of course, there are …

If you know me even just a little, you’ll probably be aware that I’m renowned for having a messy desk. Well, I’m a bit of a mess in general, but these days usually I manage to contain most of that to my own office area, under threat from my husband of him eating all my chocolate if I don’t. I actually love having a neat, tidy desk, but somehow it doesn’t seem that easy. I often tell people the story of my university days when I lived together with my …

All writers know the problem of getting hit with an idea and desperately needing to write it down somewhere so you don’t forget about it. My amused husband has got used to my odd nocturnal wanderings to write down an idea (and has also got used to telling me, after writing it down, that now I should shut my brain down and actually get some sleep. He has a point.).
Since a lot of my great ideas come in the shower, I’ve often contemplated a method for making notes there – …

A funny thing just happened to me.
I was procrastinating about getting a bit of work done – or I could fudge that and say I was taking a bit of a break after getting a stack of work done this morning (that’s true – I wrote my first 2,500 words for NaNoWriMo and also did a heap of blogging).
In any case, one click led to another and I was suddenly taking a 20-question quiz on procrastination. At the end they told me my score was 30/100 and that meant my …

I read a scary headline today at a website I half-heartedly follow. It went like this: News Flash – To-Do List Fans are Closet Procrastinators. The first point is that this is certainly no news flash for me, and I’m not even a closet procrastinator – I think I’ve made it quite clear to many (and especially on this blog) that my procrastinating is a highly-developed skill. And yes, my obsession with to-do lists is linked to this.
So what can I learn from this non-news-flash? Well, as they quite rightly …

I was just thinking in the shower (it’s no secret it’s my favourite place to think), and I realised there is one step more to my writing procrastination problem that I need to deal with: impatience.
My mother (among many others, no doubt) can well attest to the fact that I have something of an impatient personality. She often tells the story that when I was a child and I came to her and said I wanted to learn how to do something (for example, sew, cook, do something on the …

I discovered a great fiction-writing blog called Drops of Blood recently and this week Carolyn started a series which is right down my alley … she’s taking note of the various excuses she provides herself when she doesn’t work on her fiction writing, and then trying to find ways to avoid having that excuse rear its ugly head again.
Her first Why I Didn’t Write excuse is a very simple one – she slept too late. (Mental note to self: I haven’t actually used this excuse with myself yet! But I’m …

A post this week at the Writer’s Technology Companion tipped me off about a page at that often-lovely newspaper, the UK Guardian, featuring a collection of writers’ rooms. There are links to some 50 or more photographs and anecdotes about where a bunch of successful writers actually write. I’ve seen quite a few stories like this going around lately – it seems to be an in vogue obsession – but I have to admit that it does make me very curious. Despite my champion procrastinating skills I didn’t click on …

I have been out-procrastinated. In fact, while my own tendencies to put off writing have been waning recently – I actually seem to get my fingers on the keyboard more often than I used to – Anna from the Zwei Sprachen blog has been busily writing lists about why she’s not writing. Which in itself is, actually, writing, but not the kind she wants to do, I guess.
Zwei Sprachen is German for “two languages” and I’ve been following the blog because it has interesting posts in both these languages – …