Why I Finally Stopped Procrastinating / 18 May 2026

Last June, after starting chemotherapy, I found myself with an unusual amount of time to think. Not always cheerfully, I’ll admit, and not always in places I’d have chosen for creative reflection. But when your calendar suddenly fills up with treatment sessions, hospital appointments, and long hours of waiting, you do start to take stock.

One conclusion became impossible to ignore: I had spent far too long telling myself I’d get around to finishing certain projects “one day.” It turns out “one day” is not a particularly reliable date.

So I decided to stop procrastinating and start doing.

Among the projects I dusted off was a story I’d originally imagined for the middle-grade members of the family. At the time, they were exactly the right age for magical adventures, strange worlds, and the sort of peril that is alarming enough to be exciting but not so alarming that anyone needs a nice sit down afterwards. Naturally, by the time I finally got serious about finishing it, those same family members had committed the outrageous act of growing older.

Rude, frankly.

Still, the story stayed with me. During treatment, and especially during some fairly miserable inpatient stretches, I went back to old outlines, refreshed scenes, rethought characters, and gave the whole thing the attention it had been asking for all along.

So in a strange way, a difficult season forced a useful honesty: if something matters to you, don’t keep saving it for some future version of yourself. That person is probably just as busy, and possibly worse organised.

Better to begin now.