It's Not Only About Time

As I was commenting on someone else's blog just now, a thought occurred to me.  It's not just about having the time to write.  I have scads of time.  I'd have more if I budgeted it better.  It's also about having the space in my brain to write new words. 

I'd love to write new words right now.  Like I said, I do have scads of time if I budget for it.  What I don't have is brain space. 

My brain is full of other stuff right now.  It's full of editing and cover art and marketing, along with life stuff and other work stuff, and there isn't space right now to sit down and create a new book. 

Oh, I have the ideas for new books.  I have the basic plots for three more Dennis Haggarty novels and another SCIU floating in the back of my head (and written down in my ideas folder, so I don't forget them entirely).  I also have that gritty urban fantasy thing about the Arthurian legends back there that needs to be written.  But there's no space for them in my head.

I should be thinking about the subsequent Sleeping Ugly novels - which won't be called that, but I can't think of a series titles right now.  I know they're in there.  They'd better be or I'll be screwed.

But I can't.  No room in the head.

And I'm not that good at mentally multi-tasking when it comes to writing.  Years ago, I tried editing one book and writing a new book at the same time.  It worked, but I was totally drained at the end of the experiment.

So, that's me.  Your mileage may vary. 

The Process

Every writer has their own process.  Correction, every writer has a process and adjusts it as needed.  Or maybe the adjusting is just me.  Anyway, here's how the process is working out for me...

Step One: First draft - write as many words as I can every day so that it takes me about a month to get the first draft done. 

Step Two: Set the first draft aside and work on something else for a week or two.

Step Three:  Read the first draft all the way through on the Kindle, taking notes as I go in a big 5-subject notebook of anything I see that needs fixing.  This can be as small as a comma or as big as noting that I need to rewrite an entire chapter.

Step Four: Second draft - Input notes all the way through.

Step Five:  Read through the second draft, taking notes as I go and inputting them when I take breaks.  If I did my job in step three, this should be small to medium things.

Step Six: Repeat Steps 4 and 5 until I know I can't make it any better on my own.

Step Seven:  Send to my editor.  Wait a month.  Work on something else while I'm waiting.

Step Eight: Receive edit notes back from editor and input those.  Takes a week or two depending on how bad it was and how driven I am.

Step Nine: Send the manuscript back to the editor.  Wait 2-3 weeks.  Finalize cover and blurb while I'm waiting and find something else to work on.

Step Ten: Receive final edit notes from the editor.  Input those.  Also takes a week or two depending.

Step Eleven:  Read through the book on the Kindle again, checking for mistakes I made or missed.

Step Twelve: Format book for publication.

Step Thirteen: Publish

There are probably things I missed, but that's the gist.  And it seems to be working for me. 

I started this particular process back in November, I think, with Natural Causes.  Step 1 was the month of November, then I jumped into Step 2 almost immediately.  Went through Steps 2-6 from the end of November until February 1st, when it was due at the editor.  Then I spent February doing Step 1 for Wish Hits the Fan.  Step 8 for Natural Causes begins this week. After I send NC back to the editor again, I'll be hitting 2-6 for WHTF and hope to have it ready to send to the editor by May 1st, which will be after the launch of NC in April.  :fingers crossed:  While she has WHTF, I'll be working on finishing the first draft of Early Grave. 

Good lord willin' and the creek don't rise.

Now, you may notice I don't have early readers anywhere in there.  Yeah, I don't have any of those.  I have a couple people I could send to if things got really bad and I needed an ear, but those people are also really busy themselves, so they're for emergencies only.  Anyway, I'll talk more about that Friday, I think.  (If I remember.)

Any questions?  Thoughts?  What's your process like?

Dis Organization

Moving ever onward, I started back to work the morning of my book launch (Dying Embers launched February 13th - in case you weren't following me then or weren't around my other blogs, FB, Twitter, etc.)  The first order of business was to input the WT edits I'd made notes for back in December.  Now that that's done, though, I'm looking around for something else to do.  Which led me to look through my notebooks in search of another set of edit notes I'm sure I made once I got the notes done for WT.  These were for Bloodflow. 

Now, let me explain something... or rather sum up... I have a bunch of 5-subject college ruled notebooks laying around the house.  Each one has different stuff in it - with no real rhyme or reason to any of it.  Whatever notebook happens to be handy and still has empty pages, I use whenever the mood to write or edit or ponder strikes me. 

Over the weekend, I grabbed the full one looking for those notes and realized I have no clue what's in any of these suckers.  In the interest of figuring things out, I took a pad of sticky notes and used them to denote which pages had which story.  Any pages not pertaining to a specific story, I ripped out (jotting down anything important therein). 

Now I have three notebooks with yellow papers sticking up out of them, all with book titles.  And I still haven't found the edit notes I am... was... sure I made.  I've got one more left, but I'm beginning to doubt whether I made those notes at all or whether I made the notes for another book and only THOUGHT I made notes on Bloodflow. 

I do that sometimes - think about doing something so much that I think I actually did it.

Anyway, I'm not the most organized person in the world, but I'm trying.  Still, I think my style is more Dis then actual Org.  I could really use a secretary - if I could stand the thought of someone else pawing through my stuff on a regular basis. 

On the upside, I found some story ideas I'd forgotten about, a few notes of quirky questions I left myself, and a passel of pages of me yelling at myself.  (I do that.  It's part of the process - especially when I'm stuck.)  The downside is my fat little fingers were itching to play in some of those other ideas when I have work to do.

Additionally, and apropos of something other than the subject of this post, I think I hit on the way to tie Fertile Ground (the next SCIU novel) into Dying Embers better - by making Frank the main male character instead of the dude I already have.  (I thought about changing the heroine, Teri, into Lynn from DE, but I couldn't make it work to suit the story.  Lynn will have to wait.)  It'll take some major rewriting, but I think my readers will enjoy it better if they have a character they already know waiting there for them.

How are you at organization?  Do you leave yourself notes in your own work?