Granted, I'll throw in the fact that I've had a kid with these five years of no follow up novel. Being knocked up and sick most days while falling asleep at 8:00 pm was not conducive to writing. Having a newborn and sleep deprivation was not conducive to writing. IE: read... excuses for not writing, right? I'm rationalizing my lack of work. However... I started my short story project, probably about a year ago. It's been placed in the imaginary holding station for now. That plan on that one is to create about four novella length stories the revolve around some of the sketchiest situations you can imagine. I started my current project last fall. I should be almost done, right? No! My problem is, I've got the meat of the story in my head. I know what's going to happen. I know the main event, I know how it ends. I just need to piece it together. I need to get my ass in the chair and get all those in-between spots filled in. One could definitely argue that I'm not a real writer because I can't make myself set time aside to write every day, but to be honest, it's tough to find an hour even to have some quiet time to write when there's a full time job and a toddler at home who I want to lavish with attention. The truth is, I may not write every day, but I think about it every day, I think about my story. I think about how my characters are going to be affected, they're real in my head, after all.
I can't help but wonder how to high producing authors do it. Are they more dedicated? Probably. But where do they find the time? How did they get off the ground with their own full time jobs and families? I'm sure they just say hey, this is my time to work, piss off! Before the boy came along, I was very structured, I had the time to work for hours on end after leaving the office. I could stay up into the evening working because I would have uninterrupted sleep. I could pour over my work and scratch out the shit. I could be obsessed. However, now, now that I like to be an engaged parent, I get about an hour to myself in the evening, after everything has settled down and the boy is sleeping soundly and instead of spending that time writing (like I ought to be), I sometime pour a drink and watch my stories, or I read. I can't help myself. While I'm reading, I feel guilty, like, damn, I need to be writing my own book right now so some crazy broad or dude can be reading my shit while sitting in bed.
The point of my blithering here is that I'm trying to keep myself in check. I am cutting out small sections of my day to write, even if it's only for a few minutes at a time. I don't foresee this current book being finished (completely) in 2016, though it's only April. If I hustle hard, maybe I could get it ready for a fall release, I'm thinking November. That's not much of a stretch if I give myself about five months to finish it and another month and a half for editing and re-writes. That's doable, right? Basically, I just don't want to add another year to the gap between books.
One final note is, I've posted a teeny, tiny, almost incomprehensible shred of a paragraph of the new book on my author page, I think every once in a while to keep all five of you interested, I may post a teaser or three, to keep hype it up.
