The thing about deadlines...

Sigh...it's November already. Time to put away the Halloween decorations and start thinking about turkey or turkey alternatives (I'm a vegetarian). It's also the time where I realize that I've missed the deadline that I gave myself. When I decided to become a self-published author I knew that I had to set deadlines for myself. I also know how hard it is for me to work with a deadline. I was doing well until life got in the way. Now I am more than two months behind my deadline. I'm not as organized as I would like to be. If I was more organized I may have been able to finish editing by now. I'm a bit angry at myself for not having my novel finished by now. It's my dream and I'm letting it pass me by. I'm not sure how things would have gone if I would have actually decided to go through a literary agent. I guess I would have had someone pushing me, but I'm not sure if that matters. I've never been good with deadlines. I remember waiting until the last minute to finish school assignments. Now that I'm juggling work, school, and writing I will have to find a balance. I have to push myself to edit, write, and work on pushing my work out to the public.

Why I shouldn't take breaks from writing.

It's taken me awhile to get back into the editing mood. Mainly because editing isn't as fun as writing. I don't like to skip days writing, so I usually try to either work on editing or writing something new. I feel like when I don't I'm wasting my time. After taking a break from writing, when I finally got back into editing (I only took a two and a half day break), I looked at my document and thought: That's a lot of text. Today is the first real day I've taken a look at my text and made sure everything within that chapter is in place. The way I edit is, I reread the chapter, edit it, make sure everything makes sense and nothing is overlooked. Make sure it goes well with what happens in the other chapters. After all that I move on to another chapter. Tomorrow's my day off, and I have a busy day. I don't know if I'm going to have enough time to edit, but I hope I do. I want to get everything ready to be published by either August or September.

Starting a new project while editing an old project

It's come to my attention that I need some sort of writing schedule. I'm on the final draft of my werewolf story, but I've started working on something new. I had already jotted down a few ideas for the second novel in my werewolf series, but this is something completely new. This is a huge problem for me, since writing something new is always more exciting then editing an old project. I do enjoy self editing, it allows me to figure out new ways the characters can interact, but it's nothing compared to getting lost in a world of new characters. So I need to work on a schedule, something to evenly divide my time. I don't think I should give up on the new story. I'm having too much fun with it, but if I focus all of my time on that story I'll never get my original story finished, the one I plan to publish shortly.

Editing, a necessary evil

Right now I am working on the final edit of my soon to be released book, but I'd rather be writing book two. I already have book two outlined and I've already written a little bit of the first chapter, but I keep telling myself not to work on it. Editing is more important. If I take my focus away from editing I might never get my focus back. As much as I'd rather be writing, I have to edit. I don't want to end up with a bunch of unfinished books. This morning when I was editing, I found something that I should have found in the first edit. One of my characters is named Andrew, he's the FBI agent who is originally paired with my main character, Anyssa. His name wasn't always Andrew. Anyway, this morning I was reading through and happened to find a use of his old name. I changed it, but I was surprised it was still there. Maybe I wasn't searching for errors hard enough, or maybe I was reading his name as Andrew. It doesn't matter why I left the mistake in, what matters is that is was left in. I, like many other authors, have a fear that my writing won't be good enough. I think about it being too long, or too boring. I wonder if other people are going to like it, or if it's the kind of story I would want to read. I wonder if my grammar is on par, or if my blog and twitter make people want to avoid reading my book. I try not to dwell on those things. I've been focusing on my book lately, and not this negative stuff. It does cross my mind, like every other author, but I try to ignore it and focus on the positive.