Back Cover Blurb

I was recently given a confidence boost when I found out that a famous and prolific author writes in the same way as me, a way I thought was fundamentally flawed and unproductive. Of course, just because I write in a similar fashion to him, it doesn't mean I am or will be as good as him, but it's reassuring that my processes are not necessarily wrong. When I sit down to write I don't think of the whole project to be completed. In fact, I can't even sit down without having to prepare myself. Even sitting down is a complex procedure that I have to kid my body into doing. 

If I were to think to myself 'I'm going to sit down now and write my novel', I wouldn't be able to function. Instead, I say 'I'm going to sit down now and write something, maybe, or just check my e-mail'. So I have deluded myself into sitting down. Now I open my word processing program, still not with the intention of doing much.

I'll write a few sentences, a paragraph, here and there with no particular order. I'll sketch out my thoughts, clarify some expressions that I definitely know I'll use. Slowly, over days, weeks and months, this document will become larger and larger, connections will start to form. I'll begin assembling elements in the correct order. Each time I manage to convince myself to sit down, I'll write a bit more, until one day I find that I have a whole project, very near completion.

It's at this point that I wake myself out of my delusion and work on the writing consciously. Now that my deluded self has done most of the work, I can leave it to my sober self to finish it off. This is the hard work of editing, but it's not as hard as those first few steps, which I simply wouldn't be able to take if I wasn't able to produce that delusion.