Lamentations of a Procrastinator

So, about a month ago, I decided that I wanted to enter a writing contest. Any writing contest, really, just to give me something to shoot for with my writing besides the nebulous concept of getting published at some point in the sorta-near future. After a quick search, I found and settled upon the Writer's Digest Annual Writing Contest. Since I had finished a story only a few weeks earlier and was in the process of starting a new one, I figured I'd work on both and submit one (or both!) by the end of April.

I proceeded to do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. >_<()

I'm a procrastinator. I've known this for a long time now and consider it my greatest weakness, it's something I struggle with all the time. It's the reason why I'll be given an assignment in January to hand in in May, and will still find myself writing feverishly in the wee hours of the final morning (or later). It's the reason why I'll start writing a short story in June and not finish until February. It's the one part of my character I would absolutely LOVE to erase.

So, yesterday morning, I looked at the calendar and realized I had only 2.5 weeks left until the submission deadline. That's bad, because the finished story needed editing/rewriting, while the other story was only barely started. In an attempt at damage control, I decided to set aside the unfinished story and try to jump headfirst into the edit/rewrite. That... proved semi-disastrous. It turned out that in order to get the story where I wanted it to be, I'd really have to just throw out everything I'd done already and start over from scratch. I tossed that aside in frustration.

Still, I knew I had to do SOMETHING. I had that urge to write in me...

"I hate writer's block..." I whispered. Then, I turned around, opened up MS Word and wrote just that. The result was a short rant by a struggling mid-21st century author about not only his inability to come up with any ideas, but the industry's devolvement into uninspired unoriginal dreck. It's short -- only 600 words, I think -- but I like it quite a bit. There's no minimum word limit for the contest, so I think I'm going to submit it! ^_^

I think I'll also try submitting to Ed's site, the Coalition for the Preservation of Pretentious Authors. I've been meaning to participate in that site for a long time now, but I'm so bad at finishing things that I haven't had anything to really submit until now. I should probably check whether or not posting it there counts as publishing, and if so whether or not that would disqualify the story from the contest, though...

Eh, whatever. When I figure it out, I'll post it here and there.

I'm attempting to retry the other story I started a month ago in the same style as the new one... I've had moderate success so far. Let's see if I can make it work! ^_^