Alas, not all news is good news. I have fallen well behind my projected word count in the last week, thanks largely to our 4-year-old’s birthday party and the tremendous amount of planning that goes into even the smallest small-person affair!

But also, I have re-tasked myself to assist my wife with editing the second draft of her project, Black Sun. I found it impossible to maintain both efforts with the limited time I can squeeze into my schedule, so I decided to focus on the copy editing, and once that’s done, resume with my own novel.

Which will put me behind my self-imposed deadline, but the happiest part of this development is the word “self”. I’m not going to lose sleep over it, but I do feel a degree of pressure. This is a good thing. Without this pressure, I would stop drafting and find new reasons to re-task myself.

Writing while holding down a full-time job, a full-time family, and a hobby that demands no small measure of my free time truly forces me to carve my writing hours into my calendar with a sharpened Bowie knife. The balance I have found in the last few weeks has been to take an hour of each day, at the end of the day, and disappear into the basement. I put on the Dark Ambient station on Pandora, and churn out the words. Night after night, I’m finding this allows for a fair amount of continuity. However, I can manage approximately 1200 words per hour like this. Often I’ll find myself drawn into a narrative, and I’ll spend extra time to arrive in the neighborhood of 2000 words.

But to catch up to my original goal, I’ll need to bring in 1900 words per day. This means getting creative with my writing schedule. Weekends will need to devote more time, not less. Evenings may grow to an hour and a half. And though my deadline is completely arbitrary, I still want to make it, simply for the satisfaction of the accomplished goal.

Tally ho!