Category: Miscellaneous

I’ve been on vacation and haven’t gotten much writing done (although I did manage to write a few pages of  notes on Sable in Orlando), so I don’t have much to talk about on the writing front, but I did want to mention a book I’ve just started reading called Half The Sky by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. You may have heard the title before: Oprah talked about the book, an essay called “The Woman’s Crusade,” adapted from the book, was published by The New York Times Magazine, and WuDunn was recently interviewed by Stephen Colbert. I want to add my tiny voice to that chorus. I read the Times essay and it inspired me to buy the book, which I began reading on vacation. It is an enlightening and sobering read, and while the statistics can seem overwhelming and depressing, Kristof and WuDunn highlight stories of girls and women who overcame amazing odds to build a good life for themselves, often with only the smallest amount of help from others. I personally find the book fascinating because, without my conscious intent, many of my stories have turned out to be about women and girls fighting the circumstances of their birth to create a better future for themselves and their families. I try to make my stories as realistic as possible no matter what genre I am writing in, but I am constantly confronted by a real world that is harsher and more horrific than any I can create. The stories in this book show that there is not just horror in this world; there is also hope, which is something that can sometimes seem to be in very short supply.

One of the perks of my day job is that I get to see what the libraries in my consortium are buying. Without any extra effort I know when a new Stephen King book is coming out or when a summer blockbuster is about to be released on DVD, and sometimes I’ll be alerted to a hidden gem or something I might have   missed when it was new.

Procrastination: Why You do it, What to do About it Now by Jane B. Burka and Lenora M. Yuen is one of those happy discoveries. The much-updated second edition was published at the end of last year, and had escaped my notice until one of the libraries requested a record for it. Procrastination has been a problem for me as long as I can remember. I always get my work done, but not always in the most efficient manner, and many times I will work right up to a deadline, causing myself more aggravation and stress when I have enough already. When I don’t have a deadline, I have to fight the temptation to let things slide. With writing it’s even more difficult, because there are no libraries to complain if I don’t do the work. I don’t have an editor or an agent to notice if I don’t finish a novel or write a short story I’ve been thinking about. I’ve written plan after plan for my writing career (I am a master at writing To Do lists and plans) but when it comes to actually implementing them, I always end up putting off what I could do tonight until tomorrow, or the weekend, or maybe my next vacation. So when I saw Burka and Yuen’s book was available for the Kindle, I jumped on it.

The first part of the book goes into the psychology of procrastination (that would be the “why you do it” part) and it’s fascinating to see how the same dysfunctional coping mechanism can be used by so many people to serve so many different needs. It’s definitely given me insight into why I procrastinate, and I’m really looking forward to getting into the “what to do about it now” part. I’ll write about how the program helps me when I get there, but I figured if you’re at all like me, you’d want to know about this book sooner rather than later. Burka and Yuen have helped thousands of people overcome procrastination. I don’t see why they can’t help me–and you–too.