Themeattics

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

In the closing paragraph of my post on rationalization, I mentioned that I was coming up on a few months of extreme workload. Now that I’m here for the one month recap, I realize I never actually got into what that meant, so I guess I should start there.

The post header image was my planned schedule for August (starting a week late, unfortunately) through the end of October. At a glance it’s just words, so let me give you a quick breakdown of why I set this up to begin with and what the timing looks like for each of these things.

First thing’s first – Why? Well, arbitrary or not, the reason is simple. I want to participate in NaNoWriMo for the first time this year. In order for me to be successful in it, I’ll need to have everything most everything else writing related off my plate and have the plan for that project ready to go by Nov 1. If you’ve never heard of NaNoWriMo, I’ll be doing a post on that closer to the start, but the gist of it is that it’s a challenge to write 50,000 words during the month of November.

Now for the what. Currently, my writing is broken up into four categories.

One, this site. For the time being, that’s just this weekly post, which has been a nice break in the craziness of everything else. Though, if you look further down the line, it does involve planning and implementing some new features and updates to make this more than what it is, which is a necessity if I want to build an audience to help sell myself to publishers. On average, this amounts to about an hour a week. Easy-peasy.

Two, planning for the NaNoWriMo project. My plan in November is to get the first 50,000 word of my new novel, Catalyst, on paper. I’ve discussed that book a lot in the past – it’s the one that got me started writing way back in the day – and I want to do it for real this time. But, setting up a high fantasy series requires a lot of work, and I’m only in the first phase of that work. Character interviews are something I’ve never done before – hell, I’ve never really outlined – but I’ve really been enjoying these. There are so many questions that lead into concepts I wouldn’t consider until much later in the process, it’s helping me with all sorts of plot and world building. These typically run about three hours a week, but I expect the later weeks once I’m past interviews to take longer.

Three, contract writing. If I’m being frank, this is both the most important work on the list and the most challenging. Building a world under the vision of someone else is tough, and brining out that vision through ONLY dialog is heavily counter to my normal style. Regardless, this is paid work with someone’s direct approval in mind – difficult or not, this one demands completion in the allotted time. As for the time it takes, well… a bio tends to run about fifteen minutes, same as the intro/description for the area. A zone runs nearly an hour. So, this averages out to roughly twelve hours a week, which will be lessened considerably in the lore / feedback / artifacts weeks.

Lastly, this major edit pass on Residuum, my current novel. The goal here is to smooth out the rough edges and work out narrative hiccups so that it’s ready for other people to read and give feedback on while I’m distracted with NaNoWriMo. That way I can have a month’s worth of feedback to review starting in December in preparation for polish and hunting agents or, most likely, setting another round of external feedback. This one is the hardest to estimate, since the amount of effort on each chapter varies wildly. Sometimes things are basically fine and I end up just reading the chapter through with minor tweaks, while other times I’m doing almost a full rewrite. To keep it simple, I’ll average about three hours a chapter.

So, what’s that total? Well, a “standard” week of two chapters, an interview, an area, and an article amounts to roughly twenty-two hours of writing. That’s not taking into consideration the four different mindsets I need to be in for each project. Plop that on top of a job and a family, and you’ll see my issue.

With all that out of the way, one month in, how am I doing?

I’ll start by saying I had pretty low expectations of myself. This is a daunting marathon, and my reaction to the stress of having to dig out after falling behind has been that I can’t bring myself to start again, which only makes things worse. Thankfully I seem to have grown past that, since I’m absolutely behind right now.

My weeks end on Sunday for this tracking, so as of writing this I’ve still got the rest of today and tomorrow, but I’m still needing to edit chapter 18 (current week goal) and finish six zones and four bios for area seven (last week’s goal) before I can even begin on this week’s goal for the contract. That’s… three, ten, twenty-two hours of work to catch up where I’m scheduled to be. Not exactly on course.

That said, I did over-plan the lore weeks – that can likely be done in one – so if I shift over I’m only ten hours behind. I can probably get that done before Monday, and maybe even make a little headway for the next week.

An uphill climb, certainly, but one I’m committed to finishing. Full steam ahead. I’ll see you all at the finish line.