An author prevaricating recently
I know I've written about this before, but it's important. If there is one thing authors like to do, it's prevaricate. I've never yet met an author who didn't admit to the fact that the moment they sat down to write, they felt a strong urge to do something else. Anything else. Even the dishwasher or the hoovering. Or hoovering the dishwasher.

Some authors have taken this to a fine art. Douglas Adams famously had to be forced to write by locking him in a hotel room until he came up with the goods. But pretty well all of us do it.

The silly thing is that once you get going, it's hard to stop. Once you are writing, you want to keep at it. I know this. It should mean that I want to get in there and start writing right now. But I don't. (Okay, I am writing this, but anything other than the book counts as prevarication.)

At the moment I'm at the worst possible point in the cycle. I'm just about to take the plunge into a new book. I'm looking at a word count of about 500 words (with chapter headings and a few outline contents) and I have to turn that into 80,000 words. It's daunting. Where to start? But I know that my old friend prevarication will be back every day as I get to the point when I've checked the bank account, done the emails, got up to date on Google reader and done pretty well anything else I can think of to prevent myself writing a book.

So here we go. I'm going in. Wish me luck. Hang on, though. I think the dishwasher needs emptying. I'll just get that done first...