January 8, 2016
The turn of the year gave me a renewed focus on productivity. A new contract for a series of western historical novels with deadlines eight months apart, plus the planned addition of independently published books and the Literary Wayfarer podcast to my repertoire, means I need to manage my time well.
I’m willing to make sacrifices to build my writing business, as any entrepreneur should, but to sustain my energy over the long term and avoid burnout, I’ll be limiting business hours to 50 per week. That might sound like a lot, but when you consider that I am chief and bottle washer for a business that is gaining momentum, it’s easy to see how it can crowd out my personal life.
So far, the system I’m developing to maintain a balanced life seems to be working. I’ll post more about it once I’ve ironed out the details.
Writing Projects
I’m still slogging away at editing Sojourner, (Tales of Faeraven, book 3), story of the eternal edits. I keep announcing hopefully that I’m about to submit it to my publisher, but then get sucked back under. The writing of this story came during a particularly painful time for me personally (months of being victimized by hackers followed by months of illness), so there were lots of interruptions while writing it. This created the need for more intensive editing than I would normally have to do.
I am nearing the end this time, thankfully. I’ve just completed Chapter 30 (of 33). Next week, I expect to finish going through the chapters, and then read the entire manuscript one last time before submitting it to my publisher.
Blogging
Last Friday, my monthly post for Heroes, Heroines, and History came due. I’m a regular contributor (every month on the 8th) to this history blog featuring 31 professional authors in daily posts. I’m honored to join forces with the likes of Debbie Lynne Costello, Tiffany Amber Stockton, Martha Rogers, Miralee Ferrell, Golden Keyes Parsons, and many other historical fiction authors.
Figuring our readers would be recovering from the stress and rich foods of the holidays, I decided my January post should include lots and lots of pictures. This would help writing the post to go quickly, since I was sliding into base on meeting my January 1st deadline. It was a good plan with just one flaw: tracking down pictures of medieval gardens was at once fascinating and time-consuming. Plan a Medieval Garden (Pictorial Guide) took five straight hours to put together. The picture, below, is my favorite image in the post.
This week I added Home Decluttering and Beyond to the Old Bohemian Homestead because I’m on a personal mission to remove clutter and restore functionality to my own home, and I want to share the vision.
I also updated Live Write Breathe, the website where I mentor other authors, by responding to a reader’s question: What’s the Best Way to Handle Backstory?
Featured Image: Spain: Alhambra palace gardens in Granada I, Wela49 [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons
