November 2017 – Pete Ford

Thanksgiving week meant all my time went to family things: cooking and cleaning mostly, but a lot else besides.

I took the week (actually more like ten days) off from pretty much everything else. I was already behind with my self-imposed schedule of posting here at least once a week, so that took another hit, and I deliberately avoided social media – as a result, I have pretty much no idea of what’s been going on in the news. The only thing I’ve used any computer for in the last few days has been playing games (The Talos Principle and Sir, You Are Being Hunted) and watching Netflix (I watched Cloud Atlas and Rogue One yesterday – the first pause all week where I was able to sit down and relax properly for a few hours).

Starting today, I’m getting wound back into the world. I took a few minutes earlier to send an email to my editor-in-chief to ask if there’s any news about the status of copy-editing on The Artemis Device, and whether she’s accepting Phantasms & Magicks for publication, and also to update a couple of pages on this site. I caught up a little bit with Twitter (and learned that Rance Howard died yesterday) and Mastodon (which I just started using a couple of weeks ago).

On the actual writing front, I’m planning on splitting the rest of today between doing some timeline work on the Untitled SF Project, and also writing a few notes for another project idea that I had a few days ago (it started as a short story idea, but as I thought about it it became bigger to the point where I think it’s likely to end up being a full-length novel).

On that note, I need to wrap this up; I have a couple of errands to run (the first time I’ll have left the house in three days) and then I want to get on that writing work.

Until next time…

It’s that time of year again. The month when many writers do their damndest (is that a word?) to slam out fifty thousand words in just thirty days.

I’m not even going to try. Not that I wouldn’t if I could spare the time, but I can’t. Fifty thousand words in thirty days means averaging almost two thousand words a day. That’s perfectly doable – but only if I took a month off the day job. Trying to pull a nine-hour day (that’s my average, Monday to Friday) then follow up with several hours’ writing (for that’s how long it would likely take me to get a couple of thousand words out) would kill me in less than a week, probably.

And there’s the prep work I’d have to do ahead of time. I can’t just spout out a story, you see. I must have a plan. (If you’ve seen my book Finish Your Book you’ll know something of the planning I do before the first words are committed to paper or pixels.) And given that it usually takes me around three months to go from first ideas to a completed scene-by-scene timeline, I’d have to start prepping around the beginning of August to be ready to start the actual writing on November 1. And that would cut into work on other projects, and I can’t afford for that to happen. Those other projects are just too important to put to one side.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that you, dear reader (and writer) shouldn’t have a go. I’d never try to stop a writer from writing, ever.

But I won’t be doing it. Not this year, at least.