OK 3.5 readers.
If writing was your one and only job, you get up, write all day, then stop at the end of the day (say you were putting in an 8 hour day) – how many books do you think you could get out a year?
I just feel like I’m bouncing off of a wall. I’d really like this to be my career but it takes so long. Here I am, almost another year down and still no published book.
I work. I come home. I’m tired. My weekends end up filled with all of the life sustaining stuff, it is so slow going.
I’m an overachiever. I’m not happy with the “oh well I just like to write for the sake of writing.”
I’ve heard all kinds of theories about this and I realize it also depends on the substance.
If you’re writing a critically acclaimed prize winner, that’s different than say, a mad cap zombie romp. Both are loved by their fan bases, but both are different.
How many books a year could you put out if it were to become all you do?
I also realize I need to stop starting and stopping.
I finished a first draft of How the West Was Zombed and the felt like an achievement…but I feel like it does need a major rewrite.
Then I wrote the beginning of Undead Man’s Hand and I felt that was tighter – the characters, the timeline, the town, there wasn’t a lot of room for me to wiggle around and make it go off in all kinds of directions like I did in Zombed.
Undead was going to be a part prequel/part sequel to Zombed. Now that I have had a few months to think about it, I think Undead will become the first book and Zombed will be the second.
Then I dabbled in Illiad Rebooted for a few weeks. Have to be honest, I enjoyed it. I laughed a lot. A lot of the sex and language bothered me. I guess at this point I’m still a civilian and the one thing new writers worry about is will writing something off the wall make people think less of me?
If it takes off, great. If like 100 people read it and they’re like wow whoever wrote this must be a weirdo well…at any rate, I’d like to finish it but I’m not sure I want it to be my first novel.
So now I’m on Zomcation which is basically – Zombies+Vacation = Zomcation. A discharged war hero ends up going on a vacation to an amusement park (Wombat World) with his divorcing sister and kids.
Somehow they meet up with an actress who once played a princess but was demoted to donning a wombat mascot costume when she turned 30, and a bumbling Wombat World security guard who fancies himself an action movie cop and gets irate at the most trivial park rule offenses (i.e. gum chewing.)
And then somehow they end up fighting zombies. I’m still working on the details.
The plot is not complicated. It is in modern times so I don’t have to constantly look up how a past character would have acted. I’ve done 31,000 in a couple of weeks so I think I could get it done by the end of the year and then I would love to turn my attention to getting the first two Zombed books out and done.
I must start working on a project from beginning to end though. Draft. Rewrite. Edit. Format. Publish. No more skipping to other ideas till its done.
Its frustrating. I have more ideas than time but I hope I will eventually get to them all.
Feel free to dispense advice, 3.5 readers.
Bookshelf Battle 