Midweek madness

Well, another week is already more than halfways done (work wise anyway). Time goes far too quick for my liking (I guess for anyone's). More worryingly this is the last week in January. Come Sunday night and we will be at the end of the first month of 2016.

Now I know time is a constant (unless you start moving really fast or get too close to a black hole but that's a different matter) but still this seems fast. It's a perception thing. The older I get (and hence the less time I have left) the more time seems to speed up. I'm not after sympathy by the way. I know I'm not alone in this feeling and to be honest I don't fret about it. What's the point, I can't do much about it. Well let's move on to something other than a morbid fascination with time.

Writing seems the best place to go. I have had a bit of a stop/start writing month. Since starting of the month by finishing the first draft of my third Ben Williamson weird novella with a reasonably credible 2,339 words I've not managed to maintain a consistent writing pace.

There have been reasons. I have spent a good deal of the month re-reading and re-reading the bawdy scifi novel No Man's Land making endless corrections with my trusty (Dutch-bought) red pen. I'm up to chapter 15 in 3rd draft with chapters 16 & 17 marked up awaiting updating the Word Doc.

I started a Secret Society story just before this revision buzz kicked in (which by the way is because there is one publisher I want to sub it to who is open for submissions until Sunday) so I put it aside. The problem with putting anything aside is it's the time when another idea can pop up. And guess what happened.

So the Secret Society novel, a World out of Balance, is sitting there, plotted to be about 90-100K with the first 6.5K written and my head is full of another novella storyline which is now at about 7K in length (bar a few dozen words).

Still once I've got the revision of the scifi out of the way I should be able to concentrate on the novella full time (or full spare time - I do have a day job to do after all). Fingers crossed if that goes well I might be finished with the first draft by the end of Feb so I can get back to the Secret Society story. Of course I will then also have two novellas to revise. Must be more disciplined next time. I think this novel could well be a good one to sub around - especially as it has some crossover appeal - it's not just a pure science fiction story like other tales.

So why if I'm trying to get all this sorted am I blogging? Shouldn't I be writing the novella? Well there is a balance. Part of the thing about trying to get this authoring malarkey up and running is to grow some kind of presence online. I'm choosing twitter, tumblr and blogging as my main routes. I do have a Facebook page for my writing endeavours too but I find Facebook annoying. It's too easy to get bogged down in cat videos and pictures of people's dinners there. I must get over this though and try to add lots of funky content there and try to get people linking to the page. A matter for future weeks methinks.

For now though I am going to shortly call an end to this rambling blog entry and get back to writing. I'm going for at least 1,000 words tonight so should crack on.

One last thought - I've had five responses back from submissions from my YA fantasy the Patternmaker's Daughter all of which were rejections. BUGGER

Anyway, Toodle pip

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