Juggling work for the company that employs you involves set deadlines. A majority of my work involved proposal submission time frames. To produce a proposal, you follow standard steps, just as you do to produce a book. For a book: brainstorm, plot, character-sketch, generate log line, Story GMC, Scene GMCDs, write the first draft, then revise and repeat. Yet, the time that producing a book was taking...something was off. After all, I finished the first book, didn't I. I'd write the next and the next. I'd get there, some how, some way, some day. SOME DAY?
Yep, it was the set deadline that was missing. In the past fifty (50) days, I first drafted twenty-one (21) of those days. The other twenty-nine (29) days, I revised the first book in the series and struggled with the crud Hubby brought home from his travels. During those 29 days, I did not first draft and did not create new chapters for the series, yet in the 21 days that I actually did write draft material, I finished the first draft of Book #2. (Ta-da!)
Author Dean Wesley Smith's recent blog post, The New World of Publishing: How to Keep Production Going All Year, brought to light the importance of the production of new words. Revise, yes, but in addition to revision or any other writing-type activity, writing new words takes top priority.
To continue to write full time and in order to hopefully make a living doing the same in the not so distant future, I must produce new words. SO, I now I have set deadlines for my writing production, not just, duh, I'm going to write a book, then write another one. My deadlines are realistic and include daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals to reach those deadlines.
It's taken me a while, but in 2013, I am transitioned, baby!
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