ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

I worked on the first chapter of Frost this morning. Managed to drag 270 new words out of my brain over the course of two and a bit writing hours. Not the most auspicious start to my new writing routine, especially since it was followed with missing my train in to work. This means I shall have to do some drafting work this evening, which is okay. That’s the whole point of front-loading my writing into a morning shift, rather than scrabbling for time in the evenings. Also…new story. A new story that’s a sequel, and the middle of a trilogy. These things are always slow to start for me, ’cause you’ve got to strike the balance between something that works as an ongoing story and something that’ll engage a brand new reader. Six weeks to go before the book is due. 29,730 words left to write.  

I turned in the rewrites on Exile yesterday. And Apocalypse Ink has the novella listed as Forthcoming on their website, along with the cover image. The cover image is kinda shiny: I’m behind on getting this back to the folks at A.I., for a variety of reasons. Partially it’s ’cause I overestimated how much I can do while moving into a new house; partially it’s ’cause I’m a numpty who struggles to get his shit together; partially, it’s cause… Well, it’s because everything I know about writing is wrong at the moment. I look at a task – writing a new draft; going through editors notes; writing a blog post – and my instincts tell me well, it’ll take about this long to complete. So I allot that kind of time to the task, and discover that it actually takes much, much longer than I think. For example, I gave myself five days to process the Exile rewrite. This seemed reasonable, given that it’s how long it took me to revise projects of comparable side and roughness in the past. What I failed to take into account is this: the last time I rewrote a novella, I was unemployed; the time before that, I was doing contract work two days a week and had an abundance of writing time. Working off those assumptions is like working with someone else’s muscle memory, and realising you’re trying to do things with the instincts of someone who stands six-one when you’re only five-foot-three. I started the first draft of the

Back in January I sat down and wrote a plan. That plan, more or less, said this is the year when you write all of the things. Then I made myself a list, which broken down what all the things were in roughly the order I wanted to write them. It was an ambitious-as-hell list of stuff. Full of hope and shiny, happy unicorn spit, pristine in its gleaming awesomeness.Full of novellas, weirdly enough, ‘cause that’s the way my year was rolling. I had a bunch of novellas that were due, for various reasons, so I figured I’d go with the flow. Now we’re into April and the list of all the things has been beaten around a little, the schedule thrown off track by computer problems and work problems and that whole moving-into-a-new-house thing. That’s okay. I expected things to fall apart. In fact, I even built in time where I’d use the beginning of April to regroup and re-plan my year, figuring out what was still goddamn viable. Apparently my dream of being a self-employed hermit who never emerges from my bunker is not viable within the coming 9 months. On the other hand, I’m still moderately convinced that a sizable chunk of my writing wish-list is achievable. Partially this is because a certain percentage of it needs to be achievable, because of deadlines, and partially because I just feel the need to get a keyboard beneath my fingers and start pounding out stories until it feels natural

Sometimes, when you bitch about your deadlines on twitter, you’re just an asshole bitching about your deadlines. And sometimes, people will give you a new catchphrase, ’cause everything is better with some input from a mental organism designed only for killing:   In other news, I’ve got seventeen days or so to get a workable draft of Exile ready to submit to Apocalypse Ink, and it’s still not ready, so i’d bet get back to things.