After a two days slogging at the editing, my mind has started to wander. One of the difficulties of being left home alone to edit over half of my manuscript for a number of days is the distractions.

I’ve started thinking about all the things I could do in the house: what needs to be cleaned out, reordered, tidied. Maybe I need to sharpen my pencils, maybe all of them in the entire house. What things I could send to the op shop. Is it time to take the dog for another walk? Or am I hungry? Maybe the toilet needs a good scrub – okay, I’ve gone too far.

I’m no domestic goddess – ask anyone who knows me. But with all this swishing around in my brain, obviously I do need to do something, and take a break. The great thing about taking a break from it all is that it allows errors, or flaws in the story to pop out in my brain – just when I stop thinking of them.

A friend of mine who is a neuro-psychologist and an author explained it to me (she sometimes edits in front of the telly). It’s about distracting one part of the brain to allow another part of your brain to solve the issues without you realising.

So I’m not calling it procrastinating as I sort my shoe cupboard out, I’m calling it problem solving.