This is what I have on my writing plate at the moment:
Editing Bloodie Bones
Editing the following short stories: Sweets, Inside/out, Tag, The Watching Post, The Heart Stone, Retreat, SkyDogs, The Ballad of Pete Fanshaw
Submitting stories for publication
Finishing the short story I’m currently writing
Writing my section of the short story I’m collaborating on with Stuart
Typing up ‘The Ancestors’ [my last novel, until last August I used to write long hand and then had to type everything up afterwards]
Building a new website
Writing blog entries
Writing a review of my experience on the mentoring scheme for Writing East Midlands (well, they did fund it!)
Researching potential agents and publishers
Reading
Outlining my next novel [tentative title: The Lost]
So, a fair amount.
One of the hardest things I find is having to keep all these plates spinning. I focus on editing Bloodie Bones and look up to find six months has passed, or I take a week out to edit a few short stories and at the end of the week they’re still in my ‘to be edited’ pile (although a little better than before)
Some of these are more pressing than others (for example, I don’t have to start work on ‘The Lost’ or type up ‘The Ancestors’, in fact it’s more about trying to hold those back)
All of this has to be achieved within the finite time I can grab for writing (although if I wanted to get morose we all have a finite time) and so one of the trickiest challenges is to balance the conflicting demands.
One of the things I’ve had to force myself to do is be more realistic about what I can achieve, and more disciplined. There’s no point sweating over a website if there’s nothing to put on it, and no real benefit to start on another short story if I still have all the others to edit.
I can’t profess to having the answer, or being anything close to good at prioritising my writing life, but hopefully I’m improving. Some things help: I’m trying to set myself targets and reminders to make sure I submit to publishers, and I now have a phone which allows me to type up story ideas and blog entries on the go (no more scraps of paper littering the house). I think with so many of these things it’s about being aware of what I need to work on.
