9 Things I Did When I Should Have Been Writing

Today I should be working on some client projects, but unfortunately, I'm at that difficult  frustrating stage of the writing process where you have all the tools you  need to start writing, but somehow, it's difficult to write the first paragraph.

All I've managed to do is:

1. Email a couple of friends, though I have nothing important to say.
2. Bake two loaves of brown bread we didn't need.
3. Wash and cut up a 10 litre bucketful of parsley to dry and store for future use. I really didn't need to do that today.
4. Make lunch for 7 people. Someone else could have done it easily.
5. Watch an interesting resignation video. I think the woman will probably land another job through that video, if it hasn't happened already.
6. Read a couple of children's stories that a writer I don't know personally submitted to Damaria Senne Media for publication. I've never made a call for submission, and I'm not even sure that Damaria Senne Media is in a position to consider publishing other people's work, but people do send their work and I'd feel bad  if I didn't even read the material. Did some quality control, including a plagiarism check. I use Grammarly's plagiarism checker  because I don't want to bother reading the stuff if it's not even original. This article is another reason I always check when reading material of people not known to me, whether it is to judge a competition or to act as freelance publisher for a client. Though this was kinda work, it was still not the writing I should have been doing.
7. Wallow in guilt because I was not writing when I should be
8. Write this blog post to try to assuage the guilt that I was not writing. It didn't work.
9. Read an article on procrastination  Decided to get over myself and make like Nike.

So now I'm going to print out all the material I have on the client project I should be working on, re-read it and see if taking notes by hand won't kick-start something.

Grrrrrr!

And no, this is not writer's block. This is the part every writer has to go through with each new project: BEGIN! Some days, getting started is easier than others.