ALYSSA LOST IN SPACE

Two weeks ago I decided to do some intense catch up on my novel with a 24-in-48 writing marathon. Obviously, that didn’t happen. My Thursday began with a pretty nasty shoulder injury which made lifting my arms to type or do pretty much anything was impossible without a whole lot of pain. I hoped with rest I’d recover in time to make something of my weekend. But I didn’t.

And that was really frustrating.

But that’s what happens. Unexpected things pop up and plans get interrupted. You just have to deal with it.

I’ve mentioned before that one of my biggest struggles of late was front-loading my workload. I really need to adapt some habits and schedule my time so I can work in advance. I’ve outlined all of my blog posts from now until the end of August, and I’m slowly working my way through all of the drafts. That’ll be one less thing to worry about at least, because I know my blogging consistency has suffered.

In fact, my inability to do anything remotely productive in the last week had me so frustrated, I decided to do something kind of crazy and created a 3 year plan, outlining all of the books I plan to write, edit and hopefully publish between now and the end of 2022.

As much as I love blogging, what I want is to be a published author, and if possible, I want to make a living off of writing fiction. But the traditional model is slow, and generally not very profitable unless you happen to get lucky or you have a big back list.

With that in mind I took a good hard look at what I was doing, and what my future plans were. It involved a lot of thinking about what I wanted to write and how I wanted to publish, but I’ll get into all that in anther post. The point is, I spent a whole day detailing how I’d go about writing all these books, making sure I divided my time appropriately, but also ensuring I was finishing novels often enough that self-publishing was actually viable.

To make sure I kept up with and had regular access to this new publishing schedule, I laid out all of my plans for the next 3 and half years in Google Calendar, so it would be synced across my account and available on all my devices.

I’ve outlined time for outlining, writing, editing and querying, with generous allowances of time for the unexpected, and gaps between stages to give myself a break on whatever I’m writing. Of course, I’ve never done anything like this before, so I’ll find out as I work through it whether or not I’ve given myself adequate time. I have only my own experiences and habits to base it off of, though I did try to take into account the self-publishing time frames of some of the successful self-publishing authors in my genre.

What I’m Working On

It wasn’t until the middle of last week that I felt able to do pretty much anything, so I’ve been working slowly on Peculiar Casebook. I’m not very far into it, but I’ve been taking my time more than I usually do when I’m trying to draft. I want to be a little more deliberate this time with my first draft so it won’t be as tedious to edit. It’s quite a short story so I’m not too concerned with how much extra time it’s going to take me. I’ve been having fun with it so far since the main character is easy to write and I’m enjoying the tone and the world I’ve set up. It’s just fun!

What’s Up Next

More Peculiar Casebook. I’ve put editing on hold while I draft a bunch of blog posts and do bridal shower prep as well. Thankfully PC is only fourteen chapters, and I should still be able to finish it by the end of the month with time to spare. Next month I’ll get cracking on those edits.

Let Me Know What You’ve Been Working on!

That’s how my week went, and now I want to hear from you! What have you been working on in the past week? What do you hope to finish in the next seven days? Let me know in the comments down below!