It’s Monday, and you know what that means in the #wipmadness world. How are you all doing on your goals for the month? Is anyone hitting a mid-month slump?
The theme today is time-panic. I’m sure you know what I mean, because there are so many variations on the time-panic theme in a writer’s life. Here are but a few:
- Gaaah, so busy. How do I find the time to write?
- Is that whole revising, letting the manuscript rest, revising again, etc. thing for real? Even though I wrote my draft in three months, it’ll be more like a year or two until I can submit, gaaaaaah!
- I don’t want to be old when I first get published. But with the snail’s pace of the publishing world, that means I have to add about 3 years to my finish date, which means, GAAAAH! I’ll be old when my book comes out.
- So I saw on amazon today that a book with a similar theme to mine is coming out this summer. I haven’t worked on it fast enough! Am I screwed? GAAAAAAAAAH!
Do any of these sound familiar? All of them? What’s your biggest time-panic at the moment? What do you do to stave off the panic besides applying a liberal coating of butt-glue?
Wishing a great and productive week to all!
Progress: A little less than I would have liked, but I finished the first draft of the short last night, so I can give it an edit and send it off today. It clocked in at 15 pages but hopefully I’ll lose a little in editing.
(I also discovered that Scrivener has an option to put your manuscript goal in pages, while keeping your session goal in words. Which might not be that useful for prose, but is going to make hitting that magic 59 pages on my TV pilot script so much easier to track!)
In Time Panic, I have a lot of ‘someone else is doing it’ angst that has totally derailed a couple of projects. (The worst involving a character who gets mistaken for a vampire a lot and kind of glows in the dark for various plot reasons… it’s utterly different in tone, plot and setting to Twilight but… yeah. Can’t touch that for a while.) I also kind of worry about jumping into things too late, I’ve only been experimenting with screenplay for a year or so and I worry that I might be too old to be jumping into such an unrelated discipline to what I’ve done before. (I’m 26. I’ve been published before, but in non-fiction).
I’m actually kind of worried Dr Who is going to beat me to some of the things in my pilot at the moment, as part of it came from “Well, Dr Who doesn’t [spoilers] so I guess I’ll do it…” but they seem to be stepping up their game now.
I stave it off by remembering that at the end of the day, the important bit is the end product, the novel or film or comic or whatever and that hopefully any person who encounters my work is going to be more bothered about the work than about me. And in terms of similarity, as long as you handle things differently/better and bring your own voice and ideas to the table, it can work out fine. Also that of all the things I can do that could get my work out there faster or better… flailing and freaking isn’t one of them. And of course, having some strong encouragement from some of your friends is always good for taking the edge off the panic 🙂
Congrats on finishing your draft!
I hear you on the someone-else-is-doing-it angst, but I also think you’re right about striving to handle things differently/better. I am trying for the same!
Time panic? Do you mean the feeling I’m having right now as I contemplate opening a fresh document and begin drafting the second version of a first draft? Will I be eighty by the time I finish?
LOL. Yep. That about sums it up. 😉
Oh I have the impatience-send-it-out -too-soon-disease. I’m not going to say the very bad thing I did today but it involves the above.
But I have gone all the way back through the ms once based on my first beta. 2nd beta now has chaps 5-10 based on revisions done through 1st beta.
Hoping to send chaps 1-5 to 3rd beta this week. It’s like a choral round of the writing variety. Happy revising and writing!
Ooooh, isn’t it so hard to resist?? Keep us posted about the results from the Very Bad Thing. 🙂
This year has been good to me so far, but of course I can still stress. 🙂 I now have an agent, which means I get to stress over being on submission to editors. I keep telling myself that this is what I asked for. I wanted to find and agent and I did. Now my goals have shifted to finding an editor who loves my work. It never ends, so there will always be some sort of stress. In the meantime, I’m writing another manuscript–but that’s almost finished. Then what? Ahh!
Good luck out on sub! What have you got out there, YA or MG?