I’ve been trawling around trying to decide what to do next in my writing.
On finishing TSG* I started something new, something completely different and wrote a first draft of a story (Ice) that will either be hacked to pieces to short story length or will remain a completely unsellable novella. I finished Ice but it wasn’t much fun to be honest, the story reflecting the writer’s state of mind (not great at the time) a little too much. Since then I’ve been pretty much redrafting and finishing short story projects that were left by the wayside during my redrafting of TSG. I also reread the first draft of my other novel length project (Forever).
On my list of things to do Forever is meant to be next. Only I’ve got quite a few (at least three possibly as many as five) things I’d like to be writing – all novel length – and apparently I have to do a day job (shocking I know). And so I’ve spent a great deal of time dithering, anguishing and otherwise being a pretentious arse, ostensibly under the guise of deciding what to do next.
Then purely by chance as I was checking the stats here on wordpress.com, I came across this guest post by Justina Robson. Justina was one of the tutors on Arvon and in reading the Q & A I was reminded of something she’d said whilst I was at Arvon. It was along the lines of you can mess around all you want with notes and plans and maps and thinking but ultimately you’re not writing while you’re doing that, don’t kid yourself that you are, at some point you have to sit down and write.
And I realised I was being an arse. Sometimes you just have to get on with it, otherwise projects go on for…well forever.
That’s a pretty accurate view into the writer part of my brain: chaotic indecision followed by brief glimpses of seeming insight that are usually a result of remembering words by far wiser people than myself and/or irritating self-analysis.
Only there’s currently a lot of snot as well, ain’t colds great?
* Of course the truth is nothing is ever really finished. Whilst The Scarred God has tested rather better with my unsuspecting test readers than expected, it did still bring with it a host of corrections. Some of which I’m doing right now.