This is one that just bugs me, mostly because amateur writers tend to be so absurdly touchy about just about everything. They will ask for advice and when you offer it, no matter how delicately you do so, they will freak out because they don’t want to do what you’ve suggested. They want to continue doing all of the “bad” things they’ve been doing, they just want a “good” outcome.
Reality doesn’t really work that way!
I tried. I really did. Then everything went wrong!
I said, back when I was tracking the last book, that I was planning on taking a well-deserved week-long vacation between Christmas and New Years. It seemed like the perfect time to do it. My wife would be home two of the five days anyhow (I was off the whole week) and I wasn’t going to get anything done regardless. Therefore, time to take it easy, right?
Yeah, not so much.
However, I hadn’t done anything with it because I was still rolling it around in my head and it hadn’t reached a point where I had a firm idea of the outline or the characters, just a vague idea that I thought sounded good.
All that changed this morning though and I finally pulled the trigger. So here’s why.
So here’s where it all ends. This is the end of the 8th book I’ve written for 2021. Everyone says “you can’t do that!”, yet I do it regularly. I’ve never hit 8 before but if I pushed myself, I figure I could do 9 for 2022. I don’t know if I’m that crazy. I guess we’ll have to see.
Just finished off week three and I’m really impressed by how it’s going. Everything is flowing and I could just keep writing through the end if I let myself. I just don’t have that much time.
So here’s where I’m at right now and what my goals are for the last week of work. Let me know if you have any questions, I’ll try to help.
This is one question that I get all the time, especially when I start talking about how productive I can get. What’s really going on here, as any productive author will tell you, is that I’m getting into a flow state where I can write for a long period of time and just pour my words onto the page without having to screech to a halt and think about it.
In my opinion, it’s really what writers ought to be trying to train themselves to do. So here are some details, at least in my case.
So here goes the first official week of this book and I’m tracking my exact progress every day. This was actually a tough week because of the holiday and that usually slows me down but not this time. So let’s see where I got.
I had a couple of people ask, even after I did my “day in the life” post, exactly how books shake out, given my quick turnaround schedule so I’m going to toss this out there, both because I think it might be interesting and because I hope it might help people. So, for this book, the last book of the year for me, I’m going to do a weekly check-in to show what I’ve done. This is more of an introduction because I’m scheduled to start writing on Monday, November 22, 2021.
So let’s see where we stand.
I see a ton of this out there, but when you ask established writers how to write a book, their answers are not intended to make you happy. You being happy is irrelevant. The goal is to make your potential readers happy. That’s how you get to be successful!
Honestly, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no point trying to help amateur writers at all. Time and time again, I try to inject some real world honesty into the, unfortunately, fantasy land that far too many of them want to live in and time and time again, I’m met with hostility and anger, not thanks.
Yeah, well fuck you too.
