Between in Writer's Land

When Night Falls

I’m Between. In a writer’s world that’s the off-center place where you’re shifting from one project to another. It’s also the place where you catch up on Life Stuff, that necessary stuff you’ve let slide while attending to a writing career.

If under a publisher's contract to write, a synopsis whatever still has to be written--and approved. Choices of whatever made. But for now, I'm just dealing with myself and what to do next.

Life Stuff is easy: Pay bills, clean, groceries, recycle, house stuff, friends/family. (Hmm, maybe the latter should be the former. J)

Return to Fairy Cove

Daily Writer Stuff is usually posting on various places, Twitter, Facebook, checking sales, interacting with e-loops (I’m on some great ones, by the way), checking professional group notices, etc.

But Between…. That’s really hard and is not routine. It's highly uncomfortable, because choices must be made for time management. Time Management is perhaps a writer's biggest task.

My Between today concerns Which project next??

Here’s some of my projects:

1.  Need to create a cover for Delilah, an upcoming western romance, revisited. This is a backlist book, rights reverted, and the text formatting is done. I have ideas on that, which is a good start.
2. Ad Work, necessary for sales. Redoing the banner on this blog and reformatting. Not very easy since I did some of the HTML and have long forgotten some tricks. For now, I'm sticking with blogspot.
3. Ad Work2: updating my website, which has had to wait while I worked with other projects. This is truly time-consuming, working with links, etc. I'm reorganizing each romance subgenre, into pods, no small task.
4. Reworking a FB flub up. It was so great and somehow, I followed directions and ended up with--well, something I need to clean.
5. I've gotten material to my Oops reader, a great copyreader, so she's working on that for awhile. Mark that off the list.
6. Which Backlist book to start next, working on her remarks into my text and formatting that for e-publication. Very time consuming, very.

Sleepless in Montana

Then, the big one:

Which new project should I jump into. I spent several hours last night going through my material and options.

Here's a list:

1. Edit a completed Women's Fiction.
2. Finish a short story for one anthology.
3. Begin another short story for another anthology
4. Write the last half of a Viking historical. This would take time because I'd have to get into my research, gods, etc. again.
5. Write another children's short story for that anthology.
6. Complete a psychic romantic suspense, 3/4 done. (These projects get interrupted by what plops on the desk that day.)*

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There's more, but let's revisit that *. Every single day, something pops up and it must be handled. That interruption takes a writer off track from their current work. Sometimes it's difficult to get back into the story.

And worst of all: At some point, when weighing all the uncompleted projects, it's necessary to weigh them. Are they really worthy? That's difficult.

Between is where a writer is unanchored. Sometimes, it's just good to do the small stuff, get that out of the way first. But what do you think?