procrastination moment 100K

I am now over half way through a ten day stretch not at the day job under instruction to "rest". Rest for me means writing interspersed with lengthy periods of procrastination and sleep.

The sleep has been my favourite kind, filled with vivid dreams, a veritable smorgasbord of ideas for stories. The procrastination has been a mixed bag, watching movies at the cinema, watching dvds and then the landscape gardeners around the house. Four movies in five days, while aiming for seven in ten days. Searching for inspiration.

The writing has been a hard slog. A bit like my heart, I have had no rhythm in the last month.

With the Penitentiary about to be published, I have been working on the sequel (now drafted) and the prequel (being drafted) - the Crusades and the Fall respectively. I decided to keep working on the prequel despite a major distraction of the first round of editorial comments on the sequel arriving late last week. It was at that point I made a threshold decision, the prequel really needed to be substantively drafted to ensure consistency between the first three books that make up the Panopticon series.

Internal consistency is critical (readers will crucify a writer for plot holes) particularly given I've opted to take slightly different approaches to the storytelling in each of the three books. This choice is partly to keep my writing fresh (and entertaining for me) and partly because I personally find it easier to achieve the goal of a self-contained story in each book by adopting this approach. Variety is the spice of life.

I found the Crusades easier to draft than the Penitentiary. First draft was done in less than a year. By then the characters were well established and I was enjoying the story. It also helped that I had a month away from the day job and could write every day. [Aside: it will be interesting to see how readers compare the two books in terms of flow!]

I have found drafting the Fall much harder than I thought it might be. It is the back story on the main character in the series. When I first developed the plot and fleshed out the scene by scene story board, it felt a bit "light" to me. I could have covered the backstory in much less detail in the Pentitentiary but instead chose to write an entire book because the character fascinates me. Figuring out how to round out the story with the depth of the journey for multiple characters has proven so difficult that it has taken me until half way through drafting chapter three to figure out exactly what I want to say "thematically" to connect the characters.

It probably doesn't help that I am being quite ambitious in setting the story over a time span that starts at the dawn of time and ends circa 1879AD. A lot happens in that time! So there has been a lot of procrastination trying to figure out exactly the snapshots on which I want to base each scene in the book. It took me three days to write one scene when I started my ten day break. When the moment of theme epiphany finally came yesterday morning, I wrote two scenes in a day. Hopefully I am over the hump now. Only several more months of writing and procrastination to go...

ps. The galley copy of the Penitentiary arrived for my perusal earlier in the week. Only six weeks to publication. I'm excited.