Making Time...
...is difficult. When I wrote the first book in The Universal Library series (the name is growing on me), I was aiming for it to coincide with the release of the Tom Cruise film The Mummy. It did not. That's partly because I was moving house (and city) at the time so there were other things I had to do. But it's mostly because when I wasn't doing house moving stuff I had other writing to do. Paid work has to take precedence, stuff with a hard deadline (as in a deadline with actual consequences) needs to come first. Personal projects, and especially those that are more for fun than a labour of love, are bound to slip by the wayside. The Mummy's Quest (available here as hard copy or download) came out four months later than planned and I'm happy enough that it came out at all.
The reason I'm bringing this up now is that since I wrote the first of these blogs a weeks ago I have had two free hours to work on The Werewolf of Priory Grange and have managed a grand total of two thousand words this week. On the bright side, I'm happy with the words, I'm into chapter 3 (the first two chapters are very short) and getting to know the lead character. This is the part of writing a book I enjoy the most, the first half where you get to build atmosphere and develop characters via interesting interactions - the actual action I find quite boring to write. The down side is of course that at a rate of two thousand words a week I will barely be finished by April 2019, let alone 2018, and I want to get the second book out as promptly as possible before people forget about the first. The first draft is the quick bit where I allow myself to make mistakes and write poorly so this should be doable.
The problem is, none of the other stuff is going away. Ghostwriting is my 'day job' so I can't let that slide assuming I want to eat, and I write about one book per month which is relatively labour intensive. My web series Dark Corners goes out weekly and is really where the idea for the books came from, as well as giving me a ready made audience for it, so even if I wanted to cut back on that it wouldn't help the books. Then I have a couple of other bigger projects which may help me to find a writing career beyond ghosting trash romance. All of this needs doing, most of it needs doing now.
What's the answer? There isn't one. There are a finite number of hours in the day and there are no shortcuts to writing what I need to write. The only real 'solution' is to manage my time better, make sure I'm working on the right thing at the right time and that I'm not taking too much frivolous time off for things like writing blogs...
At this point, I still believe I can get The Werewolf of Priory Grange out in April. It will be a struggle and a small thing could throw it off the rails, but having this blog helps, if only because it makes me believe - however erroneously - that there is an audience out there waiting for this who I should not let down.
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