New Project Week & Three Card Monte Drafting

With the Warhol Sleeping draft in the bag, I get to start a new project this week.

It’s not a NaNoWriMo project, despite being started on November 1, because my current process is spectacularly ill-suited to doing NaNo. In fact, it’s one of those batshit crazy approaches that works for me in my current situation, but would make me shake my head if someone suggested it in a writing class.

Basically, I’m trying to stay ahead of my anxiety and tendency to fret by treating drafting as a game of three card monte: three projects, three hours of writing time each day, and a timer that reminds me to swap between them at the end of every hour.

The whole thing is focused on short, sustained bursts of focus on multiple projects, rather than three hours of trying to batter my head against a single book. No word count goals, just a specific amount of time staying focused on each draft, usually packed into the space between lunch and my partner arriving home.

It’s unlikely that I’m going to make 50k on any particular project in the space of a month, but it’s possible I’ll clear that total. I did about 37,000 words in the last two weeks, courtesy of making short bursts of progress on multiple projects. It turns out that constant incremental advances add up really quickly, and packing the bulk of my drafting into a three-hour block leaves me a good chunk of day to devote to PhD research, editing, and other necessary tasks that I need to clear off the decks.

It’s not a permanent process–I doubt there will ever be a process that I stick with long-term, simply because process adapts to suit the reality of my current situation–but it’s working pretty well right now.

It will likely be less effective as I stack up drafts and need to devote more time to redrafting and revising, but that’s trading up to a better class of problems.