E________, first draft: 72,300 words
Like many dinosaurs (see previous post) I am not a multitasker, one of the myriad ways that I am unfit for the modern world. On the other hand, like most creatures of a reptilian bent (are dinosaurs reptiles?), I am seldom plagued by guilt. I try and do the right thing and/or my best, and if it doesn’t work out, too bad: time to move on.
A strategy that is presently failing me. My inability to multitask is drowning me in shame and remorse.
I love to write. Paradoxically perhaps, it helps me get out of my own head and relax, the perfect antidote to a stressful day job. For me, getting published was a fun daydream that might or might not come true, like winning the lottery, but the joy is in the writing. If I got rejected, my reptile brain wasn’t capable of mulling that over for very long. Time for another project, usually one that I’d already started before the rejections started to roll in. Back to the laptop.
And then I won the lottery. Braking Day got picked up and published. A Quiet Teacher is coming out on November 1. It is literally (and literarily) a dream come true.
But it also requires me to multitask.
Ideally, what I would like to be doing is writing. By which I mean, writing my next novel, E________ (as regular readers of this blog will know, I am . . . not good with titles, so I’m not going to embarrass myself further by spelling it out. It’ll only get changed, anyway). My time for writing is short: I can usually carve out an hour or two from the day (goodbye TV, it was fun knowing you; goodbye chores, until my other half gives me the evil eye). With an outline to point me in the right direction and a following wind, I can usually bang out about 600 words at a sitting. Not a blistering pace, obviously, but day after day it adds up.
But once you get published, cool things happen. Other people take an interest in your work. Like publishers. And readers. Who, not unreasonably, require other things of you. Which requires multitasking.
Recently, I have been preoccupied with: (1) crawling out of the hole I dug for myself by littering the audiobook of A Quiet Teacher with Russian words and phrases I had no clue how to pronounce. Thank you, Irina, for bailing me out!! (2) drafting back cover copy for the paperback version of Braking Day, which is due out in April; (3) reviewing the proof of The Wrong Shape to Fly, my contribution to the awesome Baen anthology Worlds Long Lost, which comes out on December 6; and (4) debugging this website, which crashed a few days ago and delayed my posting of this extended whine. I now know far more about plugins than I ever imagined possible.
All of which I approached, dinosaur fashion, one after the other, to the exclusion of anything else. All of which came out of my daily hour or two of writing time. And none of which involved writing E________. Had I been more evolved, maybe I could have done these other tasks and written a few paragraphs of story, just to keep things ticking along.
But I can’t. I’m a dinosaur.
A guilty one.
Sorry, E________. I will come back soon. I promise.
Please don’t look at me like that.