A leap of faith

I am a total procrastinator. I can find a TON of things to do before those things I’m supposed to do. There’s a reason it took me three years to finish my dissertation (well, procrastination and an evil committee chair). But, you get my point. I like fiction writing, but now I’m finding that I’m engaging in the same procrastination behaviors. And, I think I’ve figured out why (so far, it’s not the cat keeping me pinned…that should be helping). I think it’s because moving to writing full time is a freaking huge leap. A leap of faith. And, those are extremely difficult to make. So, I make the excuse that I have to make sure none of my students have turned something in within the last five minutes, or that I need to check the department’s Facebook page just to make sure that announcement got posted…and then I spend an hour wandering around FB.

So, why do I do this? Again, this gigantic, scary, life-altering leap of faith. If I actually complete my current short story, that means I have to submit it. And, strangers will read it. And some of them won’t like it. And, and, and…. It’s not that I haven’t published stuff before. I have. But that was research stuff. Stuff that could be backed up, supported etc. Not stuff that was just straight out of my imagination. Not things that other people might find weird, or uninteresting (OK, so research is only interesting to a small pool of people, but that’s the pool I was writing to). I know the pool I’m writing to now, and it’s much, much bigger.

So, here I am with a cat trying to pin me to the sofa, writing this blog, and avoiding working on the short story and on Book #2 in the series. I even went for a walk this morning which always makes me feel better. Luckily for my procrastination proclivities, somebody just went down to the basement and put in a load of laundry. That means, I can’t use laundry as an excuse to not write. At least not now. Guess I’ll just have to write. I will admit that writing this does help get me in the right mindset for writing.

The semester is effectively over. The papers for my largest class are not due until Wednesday night at midnight. I’m already planning on going in to the office on Thursday to take care of grading those and hopefully getting the senior research projects taken care of as well. Grades are due next Tuesday, so I’ll turn those in Monday evening (cuts down on the constant whinging and grubbing for better grades). Thus, I have no excuse for not writing (didn’t I say that already?) Plus, it’s raining. Stay in and write.

OK, I’m off to write. I really am going to do this. I keep telling myself I’m taking this life-changing direction. That I’m leaving academia. That I’m going to write for a living. So, I’d better actually take that leap of faith.

Here I go!