From The Ashes… – The Climb #756

Friday 19^th March 2021

After a couple of weeks, I feel I’m really slowly starting to come out of my funk. I’ve been doing stuff, so it’s not that I haven’t been productive, it’s just that the massive spanner in the works derailed me for a time.

I had to give myself time to be allowed to feel miserable about this. In truth, I probably need another week. I’ve kept things ticking along but I need to go back into my long term aims and make adjustments.

Writing projects are completely up in the air at the moment. For the time being I have two main areas of focus: outlines and editing 4S. Editing has been difficult because I’ve found I’ve been second guessing myself. My confidence has taken a big knock (although, I think I steeled myself against this pretty well).

How am I dealing with this? Finding that balance between confidence and over-confidence is never easy. However, the fact that I worry about that balance is a good self-check. I may get it wrong from time to time.

I have a task I need to assign myself where I go over a bunch of rejections and pull out the key points. This is going to be hard, but the reason for doing this is that my rejections recently have been very positive. The vast majority suggest I write very well, and for me that’s the key focus.

I need to take that into my editing.

I want to send off outlines and have a first pass edit of 4S done by end of next week. That may be being optimistic but I feel I really need to push myself hard in the next few weeks, to break out of any melancholy.

I’m thinking about video projects. A large part of this is about being creative in an unrelated field.

I’m also seriously thinking about a written web serial. I need this to be the type of story I couldn’t ever sell as a book.

The big question is time. I still feel I’m on pandemic productivity where I fluctuate between super and no productivity. I’m not sure if more deadlines are the answer. I also don’t want writing and editing to become secondary activities.

So this weekend things are going to be mulled over in my head. The focus for next week has to be the outlines and editing. If I have time after that I can look at dabbling into other things.