Sometimes lessons can be painful.
I’m not sure exactly what I was thinking when I decided to engage in NaNoWriMo under the ballsy criteria I set myself in late October. I suspect that the growing dissatisfaction with how things had gone this year, and my realisation that my current approach has not proven effective on any level, culminated in the desire to do something huge. I didn’t really think about logistics. Project management is for techies not for creatives.
Yeah, right.
What I should have done is calculate my average word speed ( a maximum of 2k per normal working day rising to 3k at the weekend if I have nothing else on) and the average time to edit a thirty minute piece of audio (around four hours). I should then have divided that by the number of days and factored in the already scheduled Other Things I had to do in November. Roll in all the other tasks such as marketing the podcast etc. and it…well:
It was never going to work.
In many ways this is a really hard blog to write because I don’t like admitting failure and without wanting to sound melodramatic this has taken a great deal of reflection. I’m at about 25,000 words of Eleutheria and I really like the story concept and some of what I’ve written and I’m pretty sure its got legs – if done properly. However, the podcasting is extremely time consuming, I have done little to push it and so very few people have listened. In the last week I’ve found myself increasingly padding the story in order to hit word count and more often not enjoying the process. This is not why I write.
In short I am ending the experiment early.
I am very sorry to anyone who has listened to the podcast and is waiting for subsequent parts. If you contact me via the blog I will be happy to share the complete story with you at some point next year, when I finish it. In terms of the charity, I will make up the rest of the target amount as a means of reminding myself in the future about not thinking things through properly and assuaging my guilt.
What now?
I usually wait until year end to reflect but, in truth, I have become increasingly dissatisfied with where I’ve got to and think most of the blame for that rests squarely with yours truly. I’m going to be a bit quiet for a week or so while I work through some of this stuff and come up with a more systematic plan to get where I want to be. If you really want some Neil written prose, please do check out Ballista and my story Crunch. In the meantime, I hope you will bear with me.
Have fun and see you in a couple of weeks.
pffssh (don’t know the way to write the sound…). Things don’t always go to plan. You had a go. Now you are focussing on your core thing. You’ll get back to the podcasting and other stuff I’m sure. Til then, give yourself a break man..you tried, you will try again and we will be hear to read how you get on, or don’t, whatever.
No plan ever survives contact with reality. Fuck plans. You’re 25k into your next novel. That’s 25k more than a lot of people ever get into anything. You set yourself an ambitious target. You’re not the first to do that. Ambitious targets are the only way we progress as writers. And most of us don’t hit them. But we get something done. Those ambitious targets raise our sights. And that’s what counts.
Hey, you definitely shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. Sounds like you’ve achieved something special (not least getting me to download a ‘podcast’ – I didn’t even know what one of those was before. I thought maybe it was a protective outer shell worn by injured mp3 players while they heal. You learn something every day – I just hope I don’t catch this ‘rss’ your site mentions, sounds nasty).
Like GLP says, ambitions make us stretch ourselves, so we get somewhere in the process of trying. Certainly shouldn’t beat ourselves up over not getting all the way there. I didn’t get down when I failed to conquer the whole of China, I just went and pillaged some other poor folk.
Your friend,
G Khan
Thanks folks – and Genghis.
Back soon.