Deadlines and procrastination.......

I am feeling all virtuous right now.  I've actually done my first assignment and forwarded it to my tutor for comment/permission to submit for marking....

So, said assignment, should have been done about 2 weeks ago as the deadline to send for marking is 1st November, and we are meant to allow our tutor's 28 days to come back to us, but hey, it's done.  Once I got my head in gear it wasn't too bad, though I'd probably have been able to do it in 3 hours not the 5 I took if I hadn't spent time faffing about on the interweb browsing stuff that I didn't need to look at, but I appear to have the attention span of a gnat when it comes to actually doing assignments. Not to mention the fact that I have an amazing ability to distract myself from what I'm meant to be doing in a sort of .... oh look, pretty... kind of way.

There are only 7 assignments to do, and 11 months to do them in, but each year I've found myself spending the last 4 weeks before the course deadline trying to do a huge amount of them that I left far too long.  I start out with good intentions, but I am really crap at keeping to non existent deadlines - saying they've all to be done by the end of July does not inspire me to rush out and get the damn things done asap.  I've promised myself I'll try harder this year.......

One of the reasons I want to get another assignment done quickly is I intend to take the whole of November off course work to do NaNoWriMo for the first time.  Unlike my assignments, this has a proper deadline, 1 month, 50,000 words... it actually works out at about 1700 words a day, which really when you look at it like that isn't too bad.

I have a 2 hour window each morning from about 5.30 am - 7.30 am where usually, post dog walk, I drink coffee and read before I have to get ready for work... instead during November I am going to use this to write, together with any other time I can wrangle - which will also reduce the number of books I am going through in a week!  I can't write whilst at work  - well i can, and have done in the past, but I feel guilty about it and at present we are very busy, not to mention the fact that if I do write a contemporary M/M piece the work filters on the e-mail will probably catch it quite swiftly as I try to smuggle it out to my home PC.

There are 2 weeks left to November, and I have some further bits to research.  Then I just have to hope that my characters want to speak to me as I write straight from their dictation, I can't do this planning out the story as it never turns out the way I want it to!

Right, enough, I need to take Ivan out for a long walk whilst it's still light, to relieve him of the frustrations of living with an in season Hope - which has left him with a serious case of fifth leg syndrome and me having to administer cold water and KY Jelly at regular intervals throughout the day!