I’ve been in a slump since I sent The Realm of Silence off to the editor. I’ve written little, and what I have written, I haven’t liked.

In part, because life

I’ve been distracted by my health, a busy day job, tax accounts time, and preparation to sell our house.

I’ve a complicated mix of health issues most of which were responding nicely to treatment — but in the past month, not so much. We’re still trying to find the source of some of them, but each specialist my GP sends me to finds and fixes something in his speciality and passes over everything else. Clearly, I’m in possession of Douglas Adams’ ‘Somebody Else’s Problem’ field, at least when it comes to medical specialists.

I love my day job, which is solving problems for organisations who want to communicate, proposing and then implementing plain English solutions. But 72 hours a fortnight plus 15 hours a fortnight commute eats into my days, especially when I arrive home too tired to do anything but sleep.

In New Zealand, most people have a 31 March financial year end, inherited from the English system of settling the year’s accounts on Lady’s Day. (Link to blog). I have until end of May to report, but I’m getting my bits and pieces together. With multiple sources of author income, superannuation, and a salary, it gets complicated.

And we’re readying our house for the market. Nearly two acres with a five-bedroom, two-bathroom dwelling that includes two living areas and a double garage, plus a sleep-out. And in a popular commuter town. We have a number of little jobs to do, but we’re tackling them a bit at a time and expect to be ready to sell in the New Zealand spring.

Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines

I was a freelance journalist a long long time ago. I learnt why the word ‘dead’ is in deadline. If your article doesn’t cross the line by the time the editor says, it’s dead. The publication will go ahead without it. Do it too often, and that editor won’t buy from you again. Before you know where you are, your career is dead.

I cannot help but apply the discipline I learnt then to my current fiction career.

I currently have three looming deadlines for stories that are not yet written, including the contemporary I started — but more about that soon.

• Short story of 3,000 words by 24 April.
• Contemporary of 30,000 words by 15 May
• Historical of 20,000 words by 4 June.

It is easy to counsel other people to slow down, renegotiate deadlines, withdraw from commitments, prioritise the people who are important to you and your own health. It’s much harder to apply that sage advice to myself. For one thing, keeping up a regular timetable of new releases is part of my strategy to achieve the longer-term goal of giving up the day job and writing fiction full time.

I can meet the goals on these three, and further goals over the year, if I write 1,500 to 2,000 words a day, six days a week. That’s not impossible. As long as a fair number of them are words I want to keep.

Let’s start at the very beginning

But I’m not writing, and I’ve finally figured out why. I started the contemporary in the wrong place, and I let the heroine know too much about the hero in the first pages of the story.

She’s a smart girl. She has him figured out straight up, and sympathises with his position.

No conflict, no tension, no drama, no story.

So to get them to their future through a story that will be fun to read, I need to go back to the beginning and start over.

Phew. I’m glad we’ve got that sorted!