A whole month (and almost another half!) has already gone, how time does fly!
I thought I would take the opportunity to review what I’ve done across January and (in trying to be honest about how well/badly I’ve done) use that to formulate a plan going forwards.
In one of my last posts I was talking about my plans for the entirety of 2017 and also showed some of the self-imposed deadlines I had put on myself.
Broadly I did manage to do most of what I wanted:
- I’ve almost finished the plan for Priest of Ashen Bone
- I finished at least one short story
- Most days of the week I wrote at least 750 words
But in reviewing the other deadlines I set myself I definitely didn’t finish planning as many stories as I had originally wanted and there was a slump in the last week of January in the actual writing.
Looking back on I think that I was trying to do too much.
750 words per day isn’t too much, especially as I pulled that back to just weekdays, and if I get into a writing-groove on the train I can usually have it done and some by the time I pull into my home station. But I have also found that if I’m between projects and I’m writing 750 words of something completely new or just unrelated I start to feel a little burned out. Part of that is likely when I’m forcing myself to write and another part of that was also the range of stories and deadlines that I gave myself so I felt spread very thin and that I wasn’t giving my brain enough time to rest/regenerate before forcing it to sit down and write something else. Inevitably this led to days where I didn’t write – which is why I have decided that any writing done at the weekends is a bonus.
To try and combat this fatigue I’m going to provisionally limit myself to two projects at once: one short story and one piece of longer form fiction.
Right now I’m working on The Business of Spiderwebs which I have just started writing up properly and I’m making some good headway into it. I am also almost done planning The Priest of Ashen Bones but before I start work proper on it I want to look at the various different storylines I’ve got going on and compare them side-by-side to make sure they fit nicely together.
The plan for February in a nutshell:
- Finish The Business of Spiderwebs
- Begin work on The Priest of Ashen Bone
- See if I can’t beat my word count for January (15,600 words)
For slightly more nebulous goals for February I would like to begin work on draft 2 of The Wind Borne King and try to make sure that I’ve got a plan in place for another short story to work on in March (or before if all goes well). But those plans are only tentative as I’d rather do a smaller amount of work consistently than trying to pile too much on my plate and doing no work at all.
It sounds like you’ve learned from January and adjusted course accordingly. I wish I could do that!
Thanks Shona! 🙂 I think you’ve got a bit more on your plate than I do though!