writing

Multitasking

We had our cold weather early in the week, so while the northeast is getting slammed, we’re warming back to our winter normal, which means an hour or so around freezing at night and in the 50s in the afternoon. That’s more my speed. It’s cold enough to bundle up under blankets, but not so cold that I have to worry about pipes freezing or stressing my heater.

It’s also good writing weather, though it does get tempting to drift off when I’m sitting on my bed, bundled up under blankets.

I’m in the process of revising a book. This is an entirely new thing that I’m writing with the hope of landing a new publisher. It’s a fun idea that I haven’t quite executed to a degree of quality that lives up to the premise, and since I want to use it to not only snag a new publisher, but to make the publisher excited, and maybe have multiple publishers competing to get it so that they’re forced to be excited about it, it’s worth putting in the extra effort to make it just right.

The other day, I figured out what to do about one of the problems with this story, but that blew up a big chunk of the book. I spent yesterday trying to figure out how to fix that, thought I’d figured it out, then when I went to write that part, it turns out it didn’t work. I think I was trying to hew too closely to what I’d already written rather than being willing to rewrite instead of just revising. This morning, I think I figured out a fix for that. This feels like such slow going, taking a couple of days to write a single scene.

One thing slowing me down is that I’m also working on some other things. I’ve been asked to submit some ideas for a possible project, and so I’m developing ideas right now. Some of them are older ideas I’m dredging up and updating or repurposing, and one is brand-new and being developed. When I have these out of the way, I can devote more concentration to that one book.

Working on more than one thing at a time is a new process for me. I tend to be all-or-nothing, but I also find that I fizzle out after a certain amount of work on any one thing in a day. Working on multiple things means I can switch over to something else when I fizzle out on something. Theoretically, that should mean I end up getting more done. We shall see.

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