Writing and Life

As of tomorrow, I will begin my grand experiment in sustainable writing. Hopefully I will actually get a book out of the experience - we'll see.

I'm not going into this completely cold: I've had a few radical writing months with NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). Writing 50,000+ words in a month has its own advantages, but the major disadvantage is that you get to the end of the month and are burned out and behind on life. Or at least I have been, in each of my three experiments with it (once during the official month, and a couple times on my own).

It's amazing how difficult it is to write for even an hour a day, what with a full-time job, cooking, cleaning, bills, and the desire to do something other than write. To be fair, I could pull it off if I gave up reading, and used my reading time for writing instead . . . .

But this is an experiment in sustainable writing, and giving up reading pretty much nixes the sustainable bit.

So, my goal:
Write for one hour every other day. Faithfully.

My hope is that this will be enough to keep momentum, but little enough that I can actually live with it over the course of months.

Theoretically I think I should be able to have a rough draft in 2-3 months, a second draft in another 2-3 months, and maybe something I'm willing to show to someone else at the end of 6 months (total) or so. A sensible creature might pick up work on an existing manuscript - of which I have a handful, courtesy of NaNoWriMo - but I am not a sensible creature. Hopefully I will get back to my neglected orphans at some point, but at the moment I want to see whether I can just begin at the beginning and keep going until I have a working draft.

Wish me luck!