I like it when I have a ton of things to work on. I love order but I thrive in chaos. That is until I lose control and there are just too many things floating around. Today is one of those days where I am on the verge of losing control.
Good thing is I don’t care that there are so many different things floating out there for a change. On top of getting my book ready for launch, I am writing a novella that will release in November as part of the aforementioned collaboration. At this point, it’s going to write itself so I’m not that worried about it.
What got my heart racing was the conversation I had yesterday about moving up the book series I am going to write for the collaboration by three months. Suddenly that was a quarter-million words of production effectively due in 89 days.
That is a total worst-case scenario as well, there’s some wiggle room in that schedule but not a whole lot. I need to make some choices in the next week about where to focus my writing time and effort for the rest of this year. In general, how I am using some of my time really.
There are always going to be problems, or challenges if you want to put a positive spin on it. Yesterday while I was thinking about these challenges I was focused on the wrong pieces. At my fastest writing speed, I would have to put in another 55 hrs a week of work get those books out, plus the ones I wanted to release before the end of the year.
Well … that’s not going to happen.
When I thought about it more today, I realized that maybe the challenge isn’t the number of hours I have available to write. Don’t get me wrong, if I could quit the day job, I would happily write 55 hours a week. Well, maybe not all the time.
I think the challenge is how do I increase my productivity? From everything I have researched, reading and talking to other authors, it means I need to explore dictation.
That’s another learning curve so do I take the time to figure it out? Does that help in the short term or would it set me back?
I had a hard time when I tried it out because writing for me is the tactile act of running my fingers over the keyboard. It puts me in that headspace. I still have a mechanical keyboard at home.
Still, I believe it’s coming down to the fact I need to add dictation to my arsenal of writing tools.
I have a lot of drive time on my hands today as I head up to see my girlfriend. It’s a four hour and some change drive one-way and I do this drive every two weeks. It works out to nearly eighteen waking hours that I can’t write each month. At three thousand words per hour (3000/wph) that would mean drafting a nearly completed book in my genre. That writing speed is a conservative estimate as well.
It looks like the only choice here is to embrace dictation.
Peace. I will be taking a few days off from blogging to enjoy family time.