When I was young, I always knew I'd have some sort of day job in addition to whatever creative hobbies I pursued, but one expectation I had was that I would have a published book by the time I was 30, even if it was only released as a self-pubbed eBook. But my 30th birthday came and went (quite a few years ago) and not only had I not published anything aside from an illustrated children's book I made for an elective in my Honours year (which I published through Blurb as a PDF and printed book but which seems to have been removed from the site), but I hadn't even finished writing a single novel draft.
With my 40th birthday less than 2 years away, I can't help but feel that time is running out. That if I haven't finished a manuscript by that point I should give up on writing entirely. I know this isn't healthy, and I've been trying to avoid this self-destructive mindset (it's not just writing, but even with exercise and diet, I sometimes find myself thinking "Well, I failed this week, might as well not bother trying anymore") but as more time passes, I find it harder to feel confident that I can actually finish a story.
Then again, I look at how GRRM still hasn't finished The Winds of Winter even though he's ostensibly been working on it for 13 years. I figure if such an established and experienced author is having so much trouble finishing a book, then I shouldn't feel too bad about not finishing my manuscript yet after starting it in late 2010, especially since I spent the last decade dicking around doing a PhD.
Still, I don't want to end up in my rocking chair 40 years from now regretting that I never managed to complete a story, so I need to work out how to make sure that doesn't happen. I'm never going to be as prolific as someone like Stephen King, who sometimes cranks out multiple novels a year, but I can aim to at least finish my standalone novella, and then maybe one of the trilogies I've planned out.
Now that I have my spreadsheet to track word counts and so on for each chapter, I'm hoping to be able to set more concrete goals for writing. As with my thesis tracking spreadsheet, I've colour-coded the chapters based on their state of completion. My brain seems to need a bit of visual help to comprehend things, so this should help me understand at a glance what I need to prioritise.
As mentioned in my previous post, I've got the start and end of the novella finished, and a small section of the middle more or less complete, but everything in between and either side of it is just fragments. Those complete or near-complete chapters can act as scaffolding for some aspects of the rest, but there are still quite a few plot points I need to resolve before I can connect all the chapters smoothly. This week I have been going through my manuscript and doing some edits, including changing some character names I didn't like (I thought they were cool when I came up with them more than a decade ago but re-reading them now makes me cringe) and tightening up a few waffly sentences.
In the past, I have tried setting daily word count goals, which has worked well for me for academic pieces such as literature reviews (as that's more of a slog through outlining work that's already been done) but not so much for writing stories (where you're essentially creating something out of nothing, something that has to be enjoyable to read as well as functional). In light of that, my strategy this time will be to set deadlines (eg. September 2024) to try to have a particular chapter draft finished. This will help me to have some focus without jumping around the entire novella but still give me some leeway in terms of how I put together each individual chapter. I'll see how that goes for a while, but if I don't make any significant progress, I'll try a weekly word count goal.
Anyway, it seems I will have a little more time for writing in the near future. I was expecting to get my thesis examination results sometime in the next week or two, but today I found out that one of my examiners has requested a one month extension. This means I won't hear anything for at least 5-6 weeks (if not more), so aside from spinning my wheels and keeping up with teaching work (which will also be relatively light until halfway through the semester, when assignments start coming in to be marked), I won't have much to do other than write.
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