Sshhh! There's a manuscript sleeping in my drawer.

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Do you, like me, have a manuscript, or two, or three, or even four, sleeping in a desk drawer? Do you know why it's there? Or, have you decided it's the best place for it?

I opened my file cabinet this week to find a manuscript I completed--yes, completed--in 1989. It's a historical novel and it runs over 100,000 words. I actually forgot about it, but it was there sitting under a stack of newspaper clips from articles I wrote decades ago. At first, I had trouble remembering why I had decided not to send it off into the big, wide world of publishing rejections at the time. Then, I read it, and my reasons became clear. It was pure procrastination.

Now, everyone procrastinates from time to time, but it seems writers tend to do it a bit more than other folks. Oh, we're not lazy by any sense of the world. That's not what I am saying, and I certainly don't consider anyone struggling to write a novel, an article, a short story, or a poem to be lazy. But writers as a whole are self-critical, and that leads to procrastination.