Okay, excuses have to stop. My tick-borne disease is on the mend, if not fully reduced to antibodies. Grandson #1 is gone back to Oklahoma. Blogs are linked, and I can put different content on each and feel okay about it. So the time has come to get to work and write.
Last night I began the task of re-establishing a routine, and perhaps tweaking what I’ve done in the past. With my wife out-of-town, and with my aches and pains under control, I had no excuse but to be B-I-C for a significant number of hours yesterday. That’s “butt-in-chair” for you non-writers, implied that it’s either in front of a working computer screen and keyboard or at a writing desk with paper and manuscript.
I was at the computer from about 3:30 PM to 9:30 PM, with a 45 minute break for supper. During that time I worked on In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. I wrote about 1900 words. Why not more in 5 1/4 hours, you might ask? First, I re-read the chapter I wrote last week, making a couple of small, though important, changes that should add a little intrigue as to what the mafiosos are doing. Then I remembered one enhancement I wanted to make to the first chapter, a simple six word sentence fragment by a radio announcer that will add nuance throughout the book.
Then, I set to work on Chapter 14. But, I hadn’t really planned or thought out this chapter, about spring training in my protagonist’s first full season in the major leagues. So it was a struggle to get into it. I kept “shelling out”, as I call it—to a computer game or a web site or Facebook or turning the TV on and off to hear some of the raging political news. I’d spend five minutes writing, get stuck, shell out to a game for fifteen minutes, think of something else to write and come back and write it. Then I’d get stuck again, shell out again, this time to a publishing industry blog, figure out what to do next, and come back to writing.
After my supper break, I had less and less of the shell out time and more time in the book as the needs of the chapter and the words of the characters gelled in my mind. In 5 1/4 hours I should have been able to write 3,000 or even 4,000 words. Maybe, if I was in a chapter I had already thought through, I could have done that. Or maybe, if I had a better way to think of what to write next, I could have produced more. But I completed the chapter, and think it’s not bad, and I enhanced two other chapters with not more than a hundred words. So I’m not displeased. Tonight I’ll be working on a chapter I have thought through, so hopefully I’ll get more done.
This morning I arrived at the office at the usual time, about 6:45 AM, beating the main commuting traffic. My devotions are from the Harmony of the Gospels that I wrote. Then I sit with my coffee and spend about 20 minutes adding to the passage notes section of the Harmony and twenty minutes formatting the letters of John Wesley. These I downloaded from The Wesley Center at the NNU website. I format them in a form I like that is tight for printing yet still very readable. I’m on volume 6 out of 8 volumes, the first five fully formatted and printed and residing in 3-ring binders, sometimes read, often waiting to be read.
Are these smart writing pursuits? I don’t know. The Harmony is not, I think, a commercial project. It’s more of a labor of love and a self-study guide. The Wesley letters might be a legitimate writing activity if I ever get my act together and pursue the Wesley study series I pitched at the Write-To-Publish Conference. That idea isn’t dead; I just haven’t figured out the exact form the series should take, and developed the idea enough to present a proposal to the publisher. But this is sort of a labor of love as well, and will lead to excellent reading matter for me once it’s all done.
So my routine is coming together. I don’t know how long it will last. I’d like for three months of it, with not too many interruptions. That will give me a completed novel, completed Harmony, completed Wesley letters, and some time to work on other projects. I might even feel like a productive writer.