Week Two Tarnish: Writing up, writing down, writing all around

Week two.  The boyfriend is working from home this morning.  He's months away from finishing his PhD which means that he's in a key phase of procrastination.

I'm not for an instant saying that drawing up graphs to explain his new approach to deconvolution techniques (don't ask, though I can show you a picture...) is not important or necessary but as yet his thesis word count is a big fat zero.

Writing is always the difficult part - and this turns out to be true even if you are a writer.  In the past week I've had a number of successes - including getting my first signed up client - but I have failed on that all important task of getting my own website up and running.  Ironic, given that one of the services I provide is getting content written for clients' websites....

Just as my boyfriend knows what needs to be written, I know what I want to say, how I want the pages laid out and I've some pretty good ideas about the images I want to use on the site.  A very lovely friend of mine has even created me a logo (useful last week for sending out proposals to prospects). There's just always other 'stuff' that seems to take priority.

I fallen into a reading world of historical dramas at the moment - yes, the infamous bodice rippers that I have for years looked upon with disdain.

To be fair my latest read The Virgin's Lover is written by Philippa Gregory, a woman who wrote her first novel whilst undertaking her PhD in eighteenth century literature.  Here then is the role model I need - a person for whom (novel) writing is the form her procrastination takes to distract her from (thesis) writing.

Anyhow, my point in raising The Virgin's Lover is that I was quite taken by a conversation between Dudley (the Master of the Queen's horse) and the young and recently crowned Elizabeth that:

'The lesser joys, the more ignoble pleasures, are those that take a man or a woman's time, make demands.  The finer things, true love or a spiritual life between a man and his God, these are the things that are driven out by the day to day.'

Elizabeth agrees and Dudley goes on to say that for her to be an extraordinary queen she has to choose the best, every day, without compromise, over and above the ordinary which clamours for time and attention.

Procrastination is older than time itself probably.  Ack, I can feel the physicist boyfriend getting ready to argue with me about that.  Time to go talk to a website developer about the design and content of a client website then....