I’m the kind of person who bites of more than I can chew. I’ve had colleagues hold ‘work interventions’ where I’ve been told I need to give up a project (or five) and the risk of working myself into an early grave is far from small. So when National Novel Writing Month rolled around, of course I was going to be using it to draft book two.
It didn’t matter that we’re still very much caught in the centre of a pandemic. It didn’t matter that my professional work has been getting busier and my personal life has undergone more than one upheaval over the past six months. I was determined to keep all my plates spinning and all the balls in the air; I wasn’t going to drop anything.
Well, we’re a week into NaNoWriMo and I’m calling it. I’ll still try and write everyday, but I’m not going to put unnecessary pressure on myself to write 1,667 words day in and day out. I could probably manage it, but I’d break my brain in the process. I know there’s a saying about not being able to edit an empty page, but writing is a long game and burn out is a very real threat. (I’m also choosing to ignore the irony of me writing a blog post to say I don’t have the spoons to write all that much.)
So I won’t have a completed draft by the end of the month (or even most of a draft if I’m honest), but I will have a few shreds of my sanity and that is proving to be a valuable resource these days. I’m still working with my brilliant editor to get my hopefully-debut novel ready for the wider world and I will take a slow and steady approach to drafting in the meantime. I won’t make vague promises about updating more often because I honestly don’t know if (or when) I’ll have the spare brain cells. I worry I jumped the gun a little in trying to get this book off the ground and that maybe I should have done a soft release. Maybe I should have focused more on marketing book two after I had a little more experience under my belt. But then I would have found another excuse to undersell myself.
Either way, I’ve taken that leap and I can’t go back now. For those who have been tracking my progress, thank you. I’m still entirely dedicated to this story and can’t wait for the world to meet my little demon babies. I guess it’ll just take a little more time than I thought. But, like I said, writing is a long game.
Bronwen Write 