“Success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” (Thomas Edison). I could repeat this saying regularly because it stays so true – inspiration is fun, but fleeting. Perspiration is what gets you through to completion. However, I would like to add to the quote – ‘and a dash of trickery.’

This week was a bad week. No energy. No enthusiasm for music or writing or gardening. Work was the exception because my brain will not allow me to avoid doing work – an essential factor in being a consultant who can pay the bills.

However, work as an essential means work becomes a procrastination tool. If there are other things I want to do or ought to do I don't do them, because I must do my work first. Some days when Chris is away, like now, I don’t make it out the door because I start on some work…and then some more work comes in…and then some more…and then the day has ended.

This week I had to use trickery to do more than work. For example, I needed to divide and then plant out sixty Cornus alba sibirica under our two-year-old birch trees. I'd done paid work all morning and I really needed to get outside. But I didn't feel like going out into a cloudy 3 degrees and digging sixty plant holes. So I told myself I could just do ten plants today. Ten didn’t seem like too many suckers to extricate from my existing red-stemmed Cornus patch and then put in the ground…

…the result was, sixty Cornus alba sibirica planted with the last going in the ground as daylight faded . Once I got going it proved harder to stop than to keep working through to the end of the task.

However, my music was progressing even more poorly than my gardening. My songwriting class’s prompt for the current two-month block is to write a song using only 3 consecutive notes. In two weeks, all I had achieved was playing repetitive jig-like tunes (as in the festive dances associated with Ireland and Scotland) on the keyboard. When I told the other class participants all I could think of was a jig, they got quite excited and said they were looking forward to hearing it.

That my class wanted to hear what sort of jig I might write helped a little. Now I needed to write a jig because other people wanted to hear it (there's another trick - telling people what you want to get yourself to do, so their expectations drive you to completion). However, no words were coming to mind and a song is not a song without words. A word problem was most unusual for me. I’m a writer by nature and write is what I do most days. As a result, my songs are usually word-driven – I come up with words then create music to fit those words. My jig tunes were not inspiring words.

So I took the perspiration approach, combined with trickery. 'I will work on jig words for five minutes,' I told myself. If I still don’t want to write a jig, I don’t have to.

I also took advantage of another trick my songwriting tutor schooled us in – if you have an idea for a song title or theme, write it down. Writing is like a bug net – it stops the idea that flitted in one ear from heading straight out the other. When I was at the July Gibbston Community Association meeting, the secretary referred to ‘eating sawdust with no butter’ (a quote from American Oliver Wendell Holmes – 'If you can eat sawdust without butter you can be a success in the law'). I'd noted the phrase at the time and typed it into Notes on my phone, trying to look like I was paying attention to the meeting but had a brief, urgent task on my phone.

I thought who might eat sawdust without butter...someone poor, in tough times. The sort of person David Seymour might think was lazy...I wrote a jig verse. Then a chorus. Then some more verses because I could pattern them on the first verse. I had a draft song! I posted the draft song on our shared songwriting forum to get feedback and spur me into the next iteration.

I was going well, but...even worse than my gardening and songwriting lethargy was my lethargy around my second novel. This has been a month-long lethargy, not just a week. It's not a problem with writing, it's a problem with publishing. The printer asked me to add some information on the cover but I put it off doing because I had no energy to invest in the launch/publicity process. How dumb is that? Write a novel, edit it multiple times, get it copy-edited, get a cover design, send it to the printer, then stop because of a few minor cover issues that need fixing.

The good news is, having used trickery to embark on my gardening activities, then my music, led me to feeling more inspired on the author front. Rather than doing leaving my tired, doing inspired more doing.

I got off my metaphorical butt. I applied for an ISBN (International Standard Book Number), received it, generated the online bar code the publisher had been asking for, then sent both to my cover designer to add in. There’s a lot more to do yet, but all I have to do is one thing a day then all the things I need to do will get done in time. I might even do more than one a day….

And, finally, after getting this far on all the things I was supposed to do, I realised I could write a blog about it. A dash of trickery can go a long way.