Closing 2019

As 2019 draws to a close, I’ve been looking back over my daily journals to see what I’ve been doing. Let me explain that a little. I have my daily ‘To Do’ list, where I list all the things I’d like to work on that day. And things I don’t really want to do, but need to, like take my pills and brush my teeth. Fact is, if it isn’t on my list, I probably won’t remember to do it.

At the end of the day, I transfer everything I’ve crossed off to my journal and add some comments. Depending on my mood, those comments might be brief (‘I got some stuff done today’), or they could be long and rambling, touching on all sorts of things that happened during the day and how I feel about them. It’s just a method of proving to myself what I’ve done, a way of reflecting on what I’ve accomplished and how I feel about things.

In looking back over the past couple weeks, I’ve noticed that I’ve been writing, writing, re-writing, editing and writing. Oh, yes, and writing.

What does that mean? I’ve been working on a lot of different writing projects. I write 2 blogs and try to post those weekly. Now, that usually means research for one of them, writing and re-writing for both of them, before I can post them. About an hour a day for each blog serves the purpose for that. Maybe a little less.

I’m also trying to write some shorts in order to produce an anthology of Atlan shorts in 2020. I keep running into walls where I’m not sure exactly how the next section of the scene goes, but I give myself an hour a day to work on that. Sometimes that only produces 500 words, others I’ll get 1000 words done. I haven’t gotten to the re-writing stage on that, because I have 3 or 4 more shorts to rough draft to get the number of words I need for a book.

I’m editing John’s next book for a spring release. This is a 2nd edit, so it goes faster, since I’m mostly looking for grammar and punctuation. Hopefully, I found all the places that didn’t quite make sense in the first edit, and John fixed them. On the other hand, I’ve read this book before (during the first edit), and I tend now to start losing my focus after a time, so I only work on it an hour a day.

I’m also writing a novel (a romance). This is a straight rough draft at this point, and I usually give it an hour a day, more or less. If I don’t feel like working on that one, I have 2 other novels (a near-future sf and a paranormal detective) that I can move over and work on for a day or two.

That’s a lot of writing projects. Could I get more done if I concentrated on one? I don’t know. I seem to be able to focus for an hour or slightly more at a time, and then I’m ready to move on to the next project. By splitting up my day in such small chunks, it looks like I’ve accomplished a lot, because I can say I’ve worked on a bunch of projects. And I have ‘naturally occurring’ breaks when I can get up and do other things, like let the dog out or throw supper in the crock pot or even go outside and work on the yard. Except for letting the dog out, those things are on my to do list and can be crossed off.

I don’t know if any other writers work on so many projects at the same time. Yes, it takes time to get anything ‘done’ done. It will be a month or three before I get the romance rough draft done. It could be another week before I get this short rough draft done and can start on the next. But in a year or two, I hope to be churning out books regularly.

Wish me luck! And perseverance.