Karin Bishop
(Some of this you may already know)
The last few years have been hard or devastating for so many, that my own situation pales, but it's affected "my literary output", to sound high-falutin'. Some health problems, some financial ones, and my writing routine was severely disrupted. I had to fall back on writing-for-hire to get through the pandemic, with little time for my own.
That mea culpa aside, I'm about halfway through the continuation (I avoid the word 'sequel' if I can) of Western Sunset. And my routine has been to set a completed book aside for a month, let it lie fallow, and then edit it with fresh eyes ... which pushes publication back further.
Western Sunset was finished at the start of 2020 and then that fallow bit, final edit, and it was published in July. I'd already started blocking out the follow-up, continuing Liz's story, and chose to ignore the existence of COVID, thinking that things were too grim and readers wouldn't want to dwell on it -- and that maybe we'd get it contained in a few months.
But the pandemic went on and on, so after careful consideration -- and reading other authors' discussions on writing blogs, where "To acknowledge the virus or not" was a major topic for contemporary fiction -- I dismantled the book and rebuilt it. It now takes place in the summer of '20; now that things have relaxed, it's odd revisiting life when there was no toilet paper in the stores.
Still plodding along with the book. Sorry I don't have a firmer answer!
(Some of this you may already know)
The last few years have been hard or devastating for so many, that my own situation pales, but it's affected "my literary output", to sound high-falutin'. Some health problems, some financial ones, and my writing routine was severely disrupted. I had to fall back on writing-for-hire to get through the pandemic, with little time for my own.
That mea culpa aside, I'm about halfway through the continuation (I avoid the word 'sequel' if I can) of Western Sunset. And my routine has been to set a completed book aside for a month, let it lie fallow, and then edit it with fresh eyes ... which pushes publication back further.
Western Sunset was finished at the start of 2020 and then that fallow bit, final edit, and it was published in July. I'd already started blocking out the follow-up, continuing Liz's story, and chose to ignore the existence of COVID, thinking that things were too grim and readers wouldn't want to dwell on it -- and that maybe we'd get it contained in a few months.
But the pandemic went on and on, so after careful consideration -- and reading other authors' discussions on writing blogs, where "To acknowledge the virus or not" was a major topic for contemporary fiction -- I dismantled the book and rebuilt it. It now takes place in the summer of '20; now that things have relaxed, it's odd revisiting life when there was no toilet paper in the stores.
Still plodding along with the book. Sorry I don't have a firmer answer!
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