Week 7- Staying in the Story

It's not going so well...

...as evidenced by the lack of blogs recently. I have not had time to post and likewise I haven't had time to work on The Werewolf of Priory Grange because I've been busy with other writing work. Admittedly that other writing is either important or paid (as distinct from 'important'), but it's still frustrating and my target of getting the book out in April is crossing the border from challenge to impossibility. I didn't intend for this blog to be a catalogue of why I'm not getting anything done, or a repeated discussion of how hard it is to find time to do this sort of work around the stuff with hard deadlines so I'll try to avoid harping on it and talk about a different issue the problem raises.

I only wrote about 1000 words of the book last week, and I had to do that hastily in between other things, just so I had written something that week. When I sit back down for a proper morning or afternoon with it then how easy is it going to be to get back into the story? The main call on my time recently has been ghostwriting - the books are a very different tone to mine and are written in first person, and if you've been writing 10,000 words a day in one style it is quite hard to just switch to another. (Or at least I find it quite hard.) I've always thought I was a pretty versatile writer, comfortable in different genres and media, and I've always worked on several things at once, moving between them. What makes this different is the time I've had to take away from my book - if I was ghosting in the morning and doing my thing in the afternoon (which is how I prefer to work) then that would be fine.
So what do you do? Well, what can you do? You read the last chapter or so that you wrote and hope that gets you back into the story, and you accept that the writing will probably be a bit shit for the next few pages while you find your feet again. As ever, first drafts are allowed to be bad - just get the story out and fix the writing later.
I'm sorry this has happened now because I had reached a turning point in the story, when all the stuff that has been beneath the surface, suggested through atmosphere (I hope), and inference starts to become explicit; when the suspense descends into actual horror; when people start to get killed. That wasn't really the case with The Mummy's Quest - as I've said before, that was more action/adventure, so it got going more quickly. I had been looking forward to writing this section but also feeling nervous because it is stylistically different to what I've written before and it's a key moment. Having to write it under these straitened circumstances is not ideal, but I'm still looking forward to it.
And that's something to say about The Werewolf of Priory Grange, however much it's delayed, however much I struggle to find the time to work on it, however much sales of the first book have plummeted this month, I enjoy writing it. And when you spend a lot of time ghosting books you don't actually like, then doing something that reminds you what a great job writing is and how lucky you are is vital.