June 2020 was a little tough – mainly because there was hardly any progress on the Story. This was really pretty discouraging and I caught myself having some thoughts that this is never going to get finished.
I hate those thoughts. Not only do they make me feel defeated, but they also downplay all the effort I’ve given and progress I’ve made.
When I had finished reading The Sand Sea (read the review here), and was able to start looking into the Story again. I was pumped to start working and my creative juices were flowing. But progress was slow, and a different story was rolling around in my head (same world, different time, some character overlap). I was able to knock out a few scenes for the current Story, then I wrote out some scenes for the different story just to get them out of my head.
I’m hoping to get to about the halfway point with the current Story’s first draft by the end of this month – July 2020 (and to come up with a working title, because only calling it ‘Story’, is getting a little confusing). But in order to do that, I’m really going to need to be able to dedicate more time to my writing. This is a tough thing to solve – what priorities can I bump down, taking time that I would usually use for them and use it for writing?
The quick answer for me: sleep. Because who needs it, right?
Just kidding. But in all seriousness, it has always been incredibly easy for me to stay up late. Especially when working on projects, I can just putter away until I’m done with something. But I need to be careful – I can very easily stay up too late, or stay up late too often, and exhaust myself. The two main evidences of this are an increase in the occurrence of chronic headaches, and a strange, unfocused feeling in my eyes.
So, to not exhaust myself, but also put more time toward writing this month, I’m going to have to stick to a plan – I’m thinking of staying up until 1:00AM for two or three nights a week. Some of this time won’t be writing (when the dishes need to get done, they need to get done), but I’m hoping that most of it will be. I know that writing and publishing is a long game, but if I can’t dedicate more time to it, I know that it will be a long, defeating game for me. I had wanted to finish my first draft in 1 year, if it takes me more than 2 years I feel like I’ll never get the other books in the series done.
Using that basic plan as a starting point, I’ll see how July 2020 goes, making adjustments as I go. It may very well turn out that working late is totally counterproductive (especially if I dump almost all of that time into Pinterest spirals). In which case, I will have to tweak things somewhere else.
Have there been times in your life when you were able to shift your priorities around to be able to dedicate more time to a project (writing or otherwise)? If so, I’d love to know what changes you made, maybe they can help me figure out what will work best with my schedule!