Somehow the weeks are slipping by faster and faster. A week ago, I decided to see whether setting goals after failing Camp NaNo this summer would help light a fire under my writing activity.
So far, I have to say it doesn’t feel like it’s going well.
Sure: I wrote more than 5K words this week. Not on any novel, though. I only participated in 4 wordmongering sprints between Wednesday and today, so Blood to Fire has broken the 13K-word threshold, and I’ve figured out how to write myself out of the box I had gotten stuck in. I love that I learned about more OOPArts in the process. The Dashka Stone fits right into the plot, and tells me I’m headed in the right direction with the story.
On the other hand, now that my current WIP is all shiny… I have no desire to go back to edits on Dementional. And I’ve selected a release date for it (8/23, to celebrate my husband’s birthday), as well as having done quite a bit of reading on this week’s announcements regarding the Higgs Boson–a key component of the novel.
I even came up with a more descriptive tagline for Dementional: What is the mass of a soul?
And got sucked down the rabbit hole of image searching for cover art for both upcoming books. I discovered that really creative, original art… is way outside my price range. And spent a few hours discouraged at having found some excellently talented artists I won’t be able to employ.
Yet.
😉
These are all necessary steps to releasing new work. But 4/5ths of my words were to promote Dust to Blood or to blog, and that feels like a very slow road to the goal of completing my third novel. Plus, I’m missing the automated chart. (Am I really that shallow?)
Maybe the insane heat slapping me in the face every time I left the super-cooled office building contributed to the nightly headaches that made me want to avoid sitting in front of the computer for any additional length of time. Maybe I’m just not cut out to write year-round. Or maybe we all go through these cycles, and I’m just discovering them now that I’m trying to power past book 1 to books 2 and 3. We’ll see how next week goes.
(And… to help cut down on distracting words… I’m thinking a once-weekly check-in might work better for me. Otherwise, I’m worried my blog will become a whinge-fest.)
You sound very busy and I think you are balancing the writing/work life very well. Takes someone else outside to say you are being too hard on yourself. Create when you can create. There’s no competition. You have proven your skills and determination make you a formidable opponent if writers had to box each other in a ring, though. 😉