The Weekend

Since alas I have to work full time at something other than writing to pay the bills it can be a bit of a struggle to find the time and energy to write during the week. Modern technology helps of course; I can take a tablet to work and get a few hundred words down during lunchtimes and breaks and then transfer it to the PC and polish it up in the evening, oh and my one tip to other writers; there is no such thing as too many backups. I currently have all my material on my PC, an external drive AND a cloud service and I update them daily. That may seem excessive but there is nothing more dispiriting than trying to recreate a piece of writing you already did.

Those little bits of time that I can squeeze out of the week are invaluable but the weekend is when I can actually act like a professional and sit down for a few hours of uninterrupted writing. With a following wind I can get generate three or four thousand words across Saturday and Sunday. Now I know this obsession with word counting may seem a little pedantic but right now I'm trying to edit Different Skies into a final manuscript for publishing; I'm getting feedback from some 'beta readers' on Secession Campaign before making a last round of rewrites to that, and I'm about 85% of the way through a first draft of another novel called 'The Fourth Planet Problem' (yes that's web address of the blog and the genesis of T4PP will be a long entry in itself). Beyond that I have an outline for the sequel to Secession Campaign already sketched out and a bunch of other ideas waiting their turn. If I don't crank out the words they are never going to get done!

There are of course also pragmatic reasons for keeping up the output. The most obvious one is that if it takes a really long time to complete a piece of writing I find there's a risk you become sick to death of the thing and want to see the back of it.; that is not a good situation when you will inevitably have to edit, change, and proofread you work before your really finished. Another reason is that I do entertain the hope that one day I really can concentrate on writing full time. Now the thing about that ambition is that very few writers make it big off of one book; or off several books. They by and large only make a reasonable living by having an income from multiple books; so word count matters!

The practical upshot of this is that if I don't post much over the weekend it probably means things are going well. :)