So many projects, so little time!
One drawback of writing (and possibly its greatest delight) is having all these stories jostling for attention inside your head. It's incredibly difficult to choose what to work on next! There are writing gurus out there who even specialise in helping writers hop onto the most marketable of their ideas - but I find it tends to be less planned than that.
Sometimes the selection makes itself in a practical way, as a commission comes along and you actually get paid to write something you were desperate to write anyway, which almost feels like cheating. But sometimes a project chooses itself - and all you can do when that happens is rejoice, and run to keep up with it.
That's what's currently happening with my follow-up book to JAIRUS'S GIRL. I decided when that was published at the end of 2015 that I would aim to get the next one ready for Christmas the following year (it's actually about Christmas, so - y'know - seemed to make sense!). I resolved the same the following year, and again this year. I achieved one chapter per year. (And we're talking preteen-size chapters. Tolstoy I ain't)
Now, this was not total laziness: I had a couple of really great commissions for film scripts during that time, a TV project getting serious interest, some fab acting jobs and I even released a DVD of my one-woman show! I also did a fair bit of historical research for the book - which is important too, and doesn't show up in the word count. (Of course, when your month:chapter ratio is 12:1, you find that by next time you come to pick it up, you've forgotten all the research and lost the bit of paper you scribbled it on)
Meantime, the blummin thing kept on writing itself in my head (as did the third book in the series, and the fourth... ), making me desperate to retain all this detail and wishing I could just write it.
Then a couple of months ago, I made a concerted effort at least to do something more at it, if only to double my average for this year to a heady two chapters. It was at a difficult time, but I managed to get some done - and then, amazingly, things opened up recently, and I got a bit of time just to write.
The ideas in my head - always rather noisy, especially at night or when I should be doing something else - all started clamouring, but it was only ever going to come down to 2; pillows, custard pies and bare knuckles at dawn - that particular TV project, and The Book. First off I went at a TV episode I'd got halfway through 18 months before (and had left off with the sound of someone entering and the name of the next person to speak, with ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE to myself as to what I intended to happen. Seriously).
Somehow I hit my stride right away and rattled off the rest of the first draft, and then attacked the book with the same glee. And until real life came back in today with stuff I had to do (as in, earning a living), my productivity rate leapt from a chapter a year to a chapter a day. If JOSEPH'S BOY ends up a similar length to JAIRUS'S GIRL, I'm already over a third of the way through in a few short days.
Will I keep it up? No promises. You should probably continue with your Christmas shopping ;o) But - there's always room for the odd stocking filler, right?
I'm just wallowing while I can in that glorious feeling of actually writing something I've been longing to extract from my head, bringing it into existence as a real thing that other people can look at. (Which is what I'm about to do next; get some feedback. Yikes)
Reader, I'm loving it.
Sometimes the selection makes itself in a practical way, as a commission comes along and you actually get paid to write something you were desperate to write anyway, which almost feels like cheating. But sometimes a project chooses itself - and all you can do when that happens is rejoice, and run to keep up with it.
That's what's currently happening with my follow-up book to JAIRUS'S GIRL. I decided when that was published at the end of 2015 that I would aim to get the next one ready for Christmas the following year (it's actually about Christmas, so - y'know - seemed to make sense!). I resolved the same the following year, and again this year. I achieved one chapter per year. (And we're talking preteen-size chapters. Tolstoy I ain't)
Now, this was not total laziness: I had a couple of really great commissions for film scripts during that time, a TV project getting serious interest, some fab acting jobs and I even released a DVD of my one-woman show! I also did a fair bit of historical research for the book - which is important too, and doesn't show up in the word count. (Of course, when your month:chapter ratio is 12:1, you find that by next time you come to pick it up, you've forgotten all the research and lost the bit of paper you scribbled it on)
Meantime, the blummin thing kept on writing itself in my head (as did the third book in the series, and the fourth... ), making me desperate to retain all this detail and wishing I could just write it.
Then a couple of months ago, I made a concerted effort at least to do something more at it, if only to double my average for this year to a heady two chapters. It was at a difficult time, but I managed to get some done - and then, amazingly, things opened up recently, and I got a bit of time just to write.
The ideas in my head - always rather noisy, especially at night or when I should be doing something else - all started clamouring, but it was only ever going to come down to 2; pillows, custard pies and bare knuckles at dawn - that particular TV project, and The Book. First off I went at a TV episode I'd got halfway through 18 months before (and had left off with the sound of someone entering and the name of the next person to speak, with ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE to myself as to what I intended to happen. Seriously).
Somehow I hit my stride right away and rattled off the rest of the first draft, and then attacked the book with the same glee. And until real life came back in today with stuff I had to do (as in, earning a living), my productivity rate leapt from a chapter a year to a chapter a day. If JOSEPH'S BOY ends up a similar length to JAIRUS'S GIRL, I'm already over a third of the way through in a few short days.
Will I keep it up? No promises. You should probably continue with your Christmas shopping ;o) But - there's always room for the odd stocking filler, right?
I'm just wallowing while I can in that glorious feeling of actually writing something I've been longing to extract from my head, bringing it into existence as a real thing that other people can look at. (Which is what I'm about to do next; get some feedback. Yikes)
Reader, I'm loving it.
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