Nicola Cairncross is back from a Write Club Lite meeting, where they get together and do anything BUT write. Planning future episodes of the podcast, doing a drama workshop, talking about writing, but not actually writing. Nicola concludes that, in order to get something done, you have to actually set aside time to do it and "just get the file out".
You can also subscribe to Clicks And Leads via Radio Public
Clicks And Leads is a "tongue in cheek" digital marketing Vzine by entrepreneur, author, podcaster, speaker, Nicola Cairncross.
Mentioned in the Vzine
Clicks And Leads 365 - Alexa Skills
Write Club The Podcast
On the blogs
Vzine 072 | Alexa Skills Goes Live!
Vzine 071 | Allowing Creative Force
Own It! 185 | Toxic People
Own It! 184 | Am I A Copycat?
Prefer to read?
Well, welcome to this week's vzine. I've got some apologies to make. I'm ever so sorry, the birds were really loud last week, and so were the cicadas, and there was that abrupt ending to section number one.
That's because I was at Write Club today, and the girls were texting me, or messaging me on Slack to say I'm repeating myself, as usual, and which bit shall they cut out. Well they made an executive decision, and I'm grateful for that, because I was not contactable at the time, but anyway, it did end a bit abruptly.
As you can hear, tonight was really quiet on the balcony. It's this evening, it's lovely. Gin and tonic time, you see? But just as I come out here, the scrap metal man decides to come past, and sets all the dogs off.
The Alexa Skill has gone live, and it's doing very well. It's a live on all platforms, including Amazon, so if you go to ClicksAndLeads365.com, you'll find it on Alexa, and you can get your smart speaker to deliver me talking to you every morning for just a minute, giving you a little bit of motivation, and marketing, and business stuff, and a bit of money stuff as well, and I hope you really enjoy it, and if you do, would you give us a review? I'd love to hear from you, and I'd love to see your reviews.
But let's get on with the show, shall we? Taking of advantage of a momentary lapse in the yapping from up the hill, I'd like to talk to you today, again, about procrastination, because I've just been to a Write Club The Podcast meeting.
It's a Write Club The Podcast meeting lite - we call it that because it's one where we don't actually do any writing, we just talk about why we haven't done any writing. And I've got to say that the hardest thing I've ever done is try to make myself write a novel, and it's hard because every single time I sit down to do some of it, I am distracted by just about everything else, because making something up out of your head is really, really difficult.
I find it easier to write poems, I've discovered, than write a novel, and so does everyone else in my group. They will find anything easier than writing a novel.
One of them has actually finished a book, and she's now shopping it around for an agent, the other one has nearly finished a book, but she's distracting herself by going off and writing something else entirely. One person has got a book out to an editor, and so she's starting to write book two, so that's fine, we'll let her off, and the other one has been writing a book for years, not just months, years, and she is finding any reason at all not to finish it.
So it is common among writers, and I think I didn't believe it, the writer's block thing, until I tried it for myself.
The other thing I'm finding really difficult at the moment is sitting down and recording seven one minute tips for the Alexa Skills things. I'm fine once I get into the flow, once I sit down and get started with one or two, and then I can just rattle off the rest of them quite easily, but I think they thing is to actually sit down and just get the file out, as one of my earliest mentors said, because if you're in the right place, and you just get the file out,
