{"id":3427,"date":"2010-11-16T03:21:50","date_gmt":"2010-11-16T08:21:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=3427"},"modified":"2010-11-16T03:21:50","modified_gmt":"2010-11-16T08:21:50","slug":"juggling-projects-isnt-a-good-antidote-to-procrastination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/juggling-projects-isnt-a-good-antidote-to-procrastination\/","title":{"rendered":"Juggling projects isn’t a good antidote to procrastination"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Yeah, the title basically says it all.\u00a0 I’m working on Genesis Earth <\/em>5.0 and Into the Nebulous Deep<\/em> 1.0, and while I’m doing really well in the one, I’m not keeping up so much in the other.<\/p>\n

First, Genesis Earth.<\/em> Since I finished the previous draft more than a year ago, I thought I’d find a lot of problems, especially with my prose.\u00a0 Instead, while a lot of the sentence\/paragraph level stuff needs tightening, I’m finding to my surprise that the writing isn’t all that bad.<\/p>\n

Today, I breezed through over 8k words, and that between running, donating plasma, FHE, and a bunch of other distractions.\u00a0 If I put even a moderate amount of effort into this, I can have it finished before next week.\u00a0 That’s good, because I had an agent at World Fantasy request to see it; if I can put it on her desk before Thanksgiving, that can only be a good thing.<\/p>\n

But as for my other project, ITND 1.0…yeah, it’s not coming along as well as I’d hoped.\u00a0 The reasons are stupid, too–mostly just lost momentum and writer’s avoidance.<\/p>\n

Right now, I’m stuck in a scene where I’m trying to build romantic tension between two characters.\u00a0 I feel like I have a decent handle on who they are…but for some reason, it feels a little too shallow.\u00a0 Maybe that’s because I’m still discovering who these characters are, maybe it’s because I tend to go deeper than most–or maybe it’s just because it’s the kind of scene that’s hard to get into, but once you’re in, it really flows.\u00a0 I just haven’t forced myself to write it–maybe once I do, these problems will go away.<\/p>\n

I do feel like I’m doing a pretty good job setting up the story.\u00a0 Last week, I ran the first chapter through my online writing group, and while it definitely had issues, everyone said that they would keep reading if this was a book they’d picked up off the shelf.\u00a0 That tells me that at least I’m starting in the right place.<\/p>\n

The characters, though, and the conflict…I worry that it’s not as deep or as hard-hitting as the first book, Mercenary Savior.<\/em> I skimmed over that book just a couple days ago before sending it out to a friend from World Fantasy, and…wow.\u00a0 I don’t want to brag, but I think I did a good job with that one.\u00a0 A damn good job.<\/p>\n

So can I pull off that kind of depth and impact in the second book?\u00a0 That’s the fear, that it won’t live up to the first one.\u00a0 And certainly, the rough draft won’t be as good–not by a long shot.\u00a0 But the subsequent drafts?\u00a0 I don’t know.<\/p>\n

Maybe I should just write and worry about it later, though.\u00a0 When I was in the middle of Worlds Away from Home,<\/em> I constantly<\/strong> thought to myself how crappy the draft was.\u00a0 When I got to the end, though, and looked back on how far the story had come, I realized that it had potential to be at least<\/em> as powerful as Mercenary Savior–<\/em>perhaps even more.\u00a0 And to be honest, that came as quite a surprise.<\/p>\n

I don’t know.\u00a0 I hope I’m not just deceiving myself–it can be hard, when you’re toiling in obscurity, to separate the truth from your own self-deception.\u00a0 But for now, things are going well–I’m making good progress in Genesis Earth,<\/em> and while Into the Nebulous Deep<\/em> has lost a lot of momentum, all it really needs is a good solid block of undistracted writing to get it going again.\u00a0 Life is good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yeah, the title basically says it all.\u00a0 I’m working on Genesis Earth 5.0 and Into the Nebulous Deep 1.0, and while I’m doing really well in the one, I’m not keeping up so much in the other. First, Genesis Earth. Since I finished the previous draft more than a year ago, I thought I’d find… Continue reading Juggling projects isn’t a good antidote to procrastination<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[68,44,32,460],"tags":[379,112,88,42,147,402,156,440,599],"class_list":["post-3427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bsh","category-ds","category-ge","category-hn","tag-beginnings","tag-character","tag-doubts-and-fears","tag-frustrations","tag-momentum","tag-procrastination","tag-revising","tag-sequels","tag-thoughts-reflections","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-Th","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3427"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3443,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3427\/revisions\/3443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}