Jan

31

The day’s almost gone.

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I’ve been all out of sorts this afternoon, simply because I made one little change in my regular routine. I normally eat lunch around 1:30, but today I ate at 12:30. All afternoon, I’ve felt like it’s an hour later than it normally is. It’s really thrown me for a loop, and hopefully doing the dinner thing at the regular time will fix it.

I did get some writing done today, but not on the novel. Today’s lucky recipient of my time was the webcomic – I read through what we have so far for the script for issue #3, figured out where the next four or five pages will take us, and wrote up one of the pages. I might be able to get the rest of the pages done tonight. We’ll have to see. And I have to do some work on TMA. Deadline for Chapter 12 is Friday, making it the first chapter for me to post to the group in February.

Jan

30

On Being Accountable

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There’s nothing like a deadline to make people get something done, or to freak out over. When you’re just starting as a writer, with no deadlines or agents or editors looking over your shoulder, you don’t have any deadlines. Not really. And not having a deadline is a great excuse to futz around and not get anything done. I mean, it’s not like we’re at work and our boss is breathing down our necks.

Write To Done has a great article today about how to deal with the lack of externally-imposed deadlines (and thus give yourself motivation to write): make yourself accountable.

So what does this mean?

It means you make your own deadlines, and you do your best to stick to them. Get someone else involved, like a friend (or members of a writing group) and make them the boss. No, I don’t mean make them give you deadlines, or even really to check your work. Set yourself a deadline, tell your friend when you plan on having it done, and then make sure you get it done – or have a valid reason why not.

And don’t set goals that are too far away. Saying “I want to have the book done by November 1st” is a great goal, but you’ll be setting yourself up for failure if that’s the only goal you have. Set yourself deadlines that are no more than two weeks away, and make them into smaller, more manageable chunks. For example, Chapter 12 of TMA is to be completed by Friday, February 1st. That is an attainable goal. And yes, I know I probably won’t get it done until Monday the 4th, but my goal is still to get it done by Friday.

The other important thing is to set some defining feature for your task being “done”. I don’t consider a chapter done until it’s been posted to my writing group. If I consider them to be my “boss”, the job isn’t done until the boss can see it.

Jan

29

On Being Flexible

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Murphy’s Law: If something can go wrong, it will.

So, here I am, with my day all planned out. Get lunch for Ari started at 10:30 so she can eat at 11. Clean the kitchen until 11:30, when I get her snack together for school. At 11:50, start getting her ready for school to be at the bus stop at 12:05. Make and eat lunch, then start writing at 1 and go for two hours, then do some more chores and get ready to meet the kids’ bus at 4:05.

At 9:30, I get a phone call from the school: afternoon kindergarten has been canceled today because of road conditions. (90% of our school district is bussed, and it’s mostly back roads. They’re in really bad condition this year. In fact, a couple weeks ago when we had that thaw and abnormally warm weather, a couple buses got stuck in the mud. The bus that picks up Ari was stuck so badly that the bumper got torn off when they tried to pull it out of the mud. But that’s another story.) So, Ari’s not going to school today.

Crap.

It’s days like that that cause havoc with my schedule. It’s not like I can expect her to look after herself while I work; being 5 years old, “looking after herself” usually ends up with a mess that will take two days to clean up and/or a trip to urgent care. But I have a choice: I can either just pack it in for the day, moaning and complaining the entire time, or I can try to adapt and be flexible.

So how do I do that?

It’s all about compromises. Keep the morning routine the same (without the snack creation and getting ready for the bus, of course). Then I break out “the arsenal”: our collection of DVD’s, art supplies, and the Let’s Pretend box. With these things she can play in the living room while I work. The movies become background noise while she plays. It’s not an ideal situation, but it will keep me sane and not have her in my hair every five minutes.

Jan

28

31%

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What’s up with the title of this blog entry, you ask? It’s the current reading on the word-o-meter for the first draft of The Morgan Affair. 31,494 words out of an planned 100,000. That’s 31%. Not too bad, especially when you consider 18,296 of those words were done in the past month. That’s six chapters in one month. I’m rather impressed. If I can keep this pace up, I should have this draft done by the end of May. Spend a month or two on the revisions/polishing, and I’ll be able to start sending out packets to agents by the end of the summer. Being able to do that would be perfect. However, given that much of that revision time would be when the kids are home from school, it’s going to be a challenge. My in-law’s, however, have given us the gift of “we’ll take our grandkids for a week this summer”, so that’ll be a great mini-vacation. If we time it right, I’ll be able to get a lot of work done. Or not. I could just spend that entire week sleeping. :)

So, it’s Monday, and time to think and plan for the week ahead. I may take a break from writing today to do some critting. I’ve got a block of 16 chapters to do. If I get that done, I’ll reward myself with working on Chapter 12.

I’m finding doing a critique of a work in a large block (several chapters at a time) is working better for me than one chapter at a time like we used to do. It gives me a better sense of the big picture, and I don’t have to stop and think about what happened in the last chapter.

Jan

25

Hooking up with my MySpace Page

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Howdy, all.

In an effort to streamline things and cut down on how much time I spend doing updates, I’ve discovered a plug-in that’s supposed to allow me to cross-post to my MySpace blog. This message is a test of it, so I can see how it works. There’s two different ways I can post to MySpace with this: a notification message, which people can click through to come here to read the message, or the plug-in can post the entire thing to MySpace. However, in doing the full post, formatting can get lost. I think, for how, I’ll stick with the notification method.

So, my fingers are crossed. Let’s hit the Publish button!

UPDATE: It works. Hooray!

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