What I’m giving up… And what I’m not

So many writers whinge they don’t have time to write. Yeah, I’m absolutely one of them.

I have writing goals. They’re not set in stone but they’re always there, sliding in and out of my head like melted ice cream. I want to write two novels each year. Ideally, I also want to have two novels published each year, but as I work with a publisher, that one is largely out of my hands. I can’t control publishing schedules.

I’m a fairly fast writer. When I’m in the groove, I can manage 1800 words an hour. When I’m not in the groove, I’m lucky to manage 500 words. Staring into space is so time-consuming.  Even so, I should be able to knock over an 80K novel in, oh, 60 or so hours? Even at 6 hours a week, that’s only ten weeks. And that schedule allows six months per novel. Six months!  That is so much time.

Wrong.

I have a full-time-and-then-some day job with a round trip of 1.5 hours of driving. I have a partner who loves me and would like to talk to me and be answered by something more than a grunt. If I don’t get seven hours of sleep a night, I’m snarly and snappy. I have friends. There are other things I like to do, such as sitting on the deck at sunrise with a coffee, or at sunset with a glass of wine. Cooking. Eating. Growing veggies. Camping and road trips. Staring at the tennis on the TV for hours at a time. Reading. Then there are things I hate but have to do, such as the taxes.

And of course there are other writing and publishing related tasks that take time. I edit for other people.  Social media. My publisher wants stuff; right now, I should be completing the cover questionnaire and dredging my brain for a tagline for the last novel, the one that is finished, and with them, but is oh-so-not finished when it actually comes down to it. Next month the edits will come back and that will be the start of a lot more work.

Right now, I’m one month in on my current WIP. My six months is neatly packaged from 1 January to 30 June.  I’ve written 8K so far. No worries, I’m thinking, as I procrastinate some more. Oceans of time. I’ll just watch this Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries re-run I’ve seen three times before. But a novel to edit has just arrived. We’re buying a house. There is a shit-load of work in getting that sorted (and that’s before we have it and there will be a triple shit-load of work in setting it right). I predict that those things will be sorted exactly as the edits arrive for the last book.