"The time has gone, the song is over. Thought I’d something more to say." – Pink Floyd
I originally had planned on blogging the next installment on breaking the rules in writing. But the past couple weeks have seen the chronic problem of time management rear its ugly head. I’ve gotten relatively little writing and promotion done, and that looks to continue for a while.
The fact is that if you want something badly enough, you find a way to do it. Almost everyone can find an extra 30 or 60 minutes, and you can get a hell of a lot done in an hour a day. A lot of writers can write a thousand words (or more) in an hour – that’s 365,000 words a year in that extra hour. If it’s important, you’ll do it.
I don’t want to spend the post complaining about my specific problems. Whatever I could say is keeping me from working much on writing/promotion, someone could point out examples of people who worked through much worse. I’ve thought a lot about the details and the options and I have come to a conclusion: writing is not important enough to me.
Now don’t get me wrong, I love to write, and I have no intention of stopping. I’ll have more novels, more short stories, more podcasts, and more promotions. This is not a post about giving up or stopping. But writing isn’t the only thing I love to do. Nor is it the most important thing I do, either personally or generally. And the other things that are also important are preventing me putting in the time I need to keep my writing "moving forward" on the various necessary levels.
So that means I need to make some choices. A while back I wrote a post about writers not letting themselves off the hook. The gist was that it is critical not to let yourself say that because you can’t do something perfectly or completely, you won’t do it at all. In a lot of ways, what I’ve been struggling with over the past two weeks is how to remain true to that.
So I have come to a decision, one that I think will feel more definite if I put it in writing, in public. From now until the end of June, I am going to focus on completing a thriller novella that I am about 9000 words into. I may also do a few edits of a short story, and I may do a submission or two of existing work, but blogging, promotion, social networking and podcasting are all going to take a back seat. Those things are important, but at this point I need to generate some more content. Both for my own sanity and for the potential growth of my fan-base, this is what I must do.
I fully expect that sometime in the future, I will write a post saying something roughly the opposite of what I’m saying now: that I’ve written some things and now I need to buckle down and spread the word. Life is not static; things change. I have found that in order to continue making progress, I need to re-evaluate things on a regular basis. And that’s what I’ve done in recent weeks.
If you’ve gotten through this post, I’d ask two things of you. First, tell me in the comments how/if you deal with situations where something simply has to give.
Second, wish me luck. This new thriller? It’s gonna rock.
This is a cross-posting from the Edward G. Talbot site.