It’s been a very busy weekend, because I’ve been helping out at my friend’s annual business open day. It’s a beautiful location and a great weekend but boy, do I feel it when the last customers have left and we’ve packed up for another year!
The whole week has been a little frenetic, actually – I changed jobs on Thursday, so had a lot of finishing off to do at the beginning of the week, we’re in the process of clearing out our storage room and there’s a new course starting that I want to catch up on before I get behind! I have also been making decorations in readiness for my Halloween party, culminating this week in the weaving of a large orange wool spider web.
Beyond these, I have done some writing, and got a few bits under my belt. Sadly, not much of the whodunnit.
Or rather, the time I’ve spent hasn’t got me to the end. It’s so odd – I can sit and write for a couple of hours, only to have moved very little either in word count or story. It’s like that dream where you run down a corridor that stretches the more you move.
So at the risk of yet another missed deadline, I am going to set myself a new one. Before I do that, though, I will do a final plan to get me from where I am to the end. I keep adding bits to the story, but what I ought to be doing is getting the key information into the interviews with the lead police officer, so that will be my focus for the coming week.
By next weekend, I will know what I need to do, and have a timetable to do it.
I will be so very, very glad to get this one finished, I just can’t tell you. I never imagined working on it so long and it is a reminder that I need to be more practical in my writing processes. It is also a reminder that every writing session missed is an opportunity wasted – I no longer have the luxury of making up writing time at 3am or working through the night to meet a target. I have to set my targets around my life, not the other way around.
It’s a lesson I should have taken on board already, but it’s one I struggled to absorb.
If nothing else, this whodunnit has been a good learning tool as to how to balance writing with my paid work; like so many things, it’s taken me a while but I’ll get there in the end!
Happy writing,
EJ
🙂
Becoming a writer 
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