"Cultivate 'midway procrastination.' That's my made-up term for starting projects and then leaving them idle. The trend these days is to fight procrastination in all its guises, but good ideas come when they're allowed to fester in your mind awhile. So don't delay putting pen to paper, but if you're feeling restless once you've begun, it's OK to leave it aside to germinate and go do the dishes."

Krzysztof Pelc is an associate professor of political science at McGill University. His story "The Duolect" made the shortlist for the 2017 CBC Short Story Prize. He is the author of Making and Bending International Rules, about the ways law deals with unexpected events and he is completing a novel titled The Sexual Lives of Plants.