Juggling 5 Writing Projects – The Climb #924

Friday 3rd September 2021

I worked on 5 different writing projects today, some of them commercial, some of them for fun.

Because I really want to get the ball rolling with the video series, I’ve really given them a lot of time this week, trying to get a new video out every day. That’s taken a lot of time, and I’m thankful I was bright enough to say every weekday rather than every day otherwise I would have been dead today. Hopefully I can find time to record 4 or 5 videos for write productively for next week to take the pressure off a little.

But, because video has been taking SO much of my time, I’m very conscious that I have a bunch of other projects that the videos have been stealing time from. And so by a weird twist of fate, my guilt has made me do small but measurable work on those projects.

For example, I might not have written thousands on the novel first draft I was working on (in part because I mentally need to be two scenes ahead of myself), but I got out a thousand. That’s respectable.

Then with a commercial project that’s taking me so long I’ve now got myself into a state where I stress every time I look at it (because of how long it’s taken), I took one item off the list to revise and did that. It was easiest to be fair, but I got it ticked off and as such, reduced my stress on this project.

Then there was The Climb, which needs to be written up and posted each day. I should be promoting it as well, but with all the promotion for The First Draft and Write Productively, which I’m still not doing effectively, I didn’t get round to it. Focus forward, Adrian, don’t panic about missed opportunities that are now in the past!

There was the new project that I’ve started as an experiment, because I told myself that I’m not going to take nearly 6 months to get to market like I did with The First Draft. That was another thousand words there.

And finally, there was The First Draft itself, which is still in planning stage and looked at worldbuilding today. Again, good involvement from people. Weirdly, when I started this, The First Draft was the video project I was most unsure about, and now I’m panicking about finding 5 varied enough topics for Write Productively to get filmed in a single day. I’ll be happy when that series goes weekly, and I’m already thinking that will be at the end of next week. It’s not that I don’t have the ideas, it’s just that most of those ideas need scripts, research, and a lot of editing.

It’s important to note that not all of the projects I worked on today were about wordcount. One was revising a document, another was planning. My wordcount was decent, but it wasn’t going to set any records.

But you know what? This is what I want. I want a few varied projects that plod along and pop out the Adrian-machine when they are good and ready. You’d think I’d be super-stressed at the moment, but whilst there are some stresses, for the most part, I’m having fun. There’s so often a spanner in the works somewhere, but for once everything is running and as a result, I got a TON done today, even if it was a lot of little things.

This is how I like to work, and the biggest worry right now, is that my juggling abilities are going to fall apart and I’m going mess up my momentum on all these projects. The most important thing is that I’m not trying to set records for word count or how many projects I can have on the go; I’m just trying to get shit done.