Everything I Know About Writing Is Wrong

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 next novella in the series, Frost, this morning. I’ve allotted fifteen days to burn through the first draft in my original plan. I’ve adjusted my hours at the dayjob so I have a few extra hours a week to devote to writing time.

I still suspect it’s going to take slightly longer than I’ve budgeted for.

‘Cause, right now, I know nothing about writing and it’s time to relearn everything from the ground up.