Freeeeeeeeedom!

For me, not my kids who are back in school starting Monday! Yay!

I think the muse (no gender, no name, poor muse) knows it too, because I had snippets of ideas all day yesterday. I’m ready to get back to work, and let’s not discuss those 70 days, shall we.

Well, let’s do but in a non-whiny way. I didn’t make it, which is sad for me. But on the other hand, I finished, edited, submitted and contracted a story I’m quite proud of and amused by. And I ended lots of sentences with prepositions. Not really. I also wrote 1000 words of crap, sheer crap. I’m new at this writing-all-the-time game, and I need to figure out what works for me. This little experiment gave me some insights. They are:

1. I definitely work best in the morning-ish, like 9am-11am, maybe a little more. Nights just don’t work for so many reasons. This is very good because it works out that these are usually my “alone hours” for the day.

2. I think I need a break between bigger projects. Not a long one, but a couple weeks maybe. I am an overachiever. I see a lot of my fellow writers writing nonstop–put one book down and pick up another, no breaks. When I tried to write another longish story right after Bell Curve I got totally framboozled ™. Short stories, the 3-5K kind I can write in a couple days, may solve this problem. I’ve found a few markets for these, including but not limited to my current publisher. So I can put down a book, take a few days off, edit some, then write a short. Maybe. We’ll see but I know FOR SURE that diving right back into something big won’t work.

3. Probably all this will change as I get more comfortable on a regular writing schedule, making it a part of my life rather than “the grand experiment”. Because that’s the other thing I realized this summer–epubbed or not pubbed or whatever, I really like doing this and will probably keep at it a while.

4. Promo is complicated, getting readers is complicated, and I need to not run around in circles trying to do that. I need to write more and write better. The rest will come.

So there, Sven. I might not have achieved the full goal of writing daily, but I did learn some stuff (note: this challenge is not over, but I can pretty much bail on it as it is. It is still my goal to write or edit every day, though. Getting there.)

Besides, NaNo is just around the corner now. Yikes! Kiara will have a sister, I think.