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I'm not writing. Just a few years ago, four or five if I want to be near exact, in what I like to call my Jesus freak phase, I told myself that procrastination was a sin. This didn't make me stop procrastinating or even curtailing it much, but it did create a tremendous guilt complex, which among other things made me procrastinate even more.

Until last November's election I often wrote about how I was still waiting for the 21st century to start. That so much of what we were going through; far right politics, homophobia and sexism, basic ignorance and prejudice were such twentieth century problems that I was depressed that we had dragged them into the 21st. I kept waiting for new politics, new thinking, hell a new cut of jeans, anything that said categorically that we had set off a new explosion, and were not coasting on the last century's fallout.

But here's the thing about waiting for the world to start something. It let's you off the hook for not starting anything yourself-Procrastination again. I'm not sure why I procrastinate so much, but I know I'm not alone. Next to actual writing, procrastination is what writers do best. And we're all brilliant at it. Once I begin writing I go pretty much to then end. I wake up at five write until 9-never earlier or later. I never run into blocks, I simply write. It sounds effortless and it is, but that's not a boast. I takes me mere days to type over 200 pages. But I take 200 days to merely start.

I think I have some talent at writing, but I'm a genius at procrastination. Even this blog I'm writing now is an act of avoiding what I really need to write. I always try to write what I've not written before, which scares the crap out me, so much that it takes months or years to finally do it. It sounds pretentious and it is, but if you're a writer, just because it's pretentious doesn't mean it's not true.

So I'm not writing. I have deadlines, but I'm not writing. I'm at the end of this blog and now have to go back to actual work, but instead I'll be reading this over and over, even after it's posted. As for reading, yeah I procrastinate with that too.

Marlon James, The Book of Night Women, Riverhead, Penguin Books