Friday 19 February 2010

Excuses, Excuses

Not my day to post so here's my excuse for running late this week.

I've always said the best cure for writer's block is a publisher's deadline. This week I faced not one but two deadlines.

I had to complete final changes to ROAD CLOSED. The hand corrected hard copy is in an envelope ready to deliver tomorrow. After eight months of scribbling, rewriting, exulting and despairing, my second book is about to leave my control. It will be published this June. There's no going back now. (It's already reached 10,000 on amazon.co.uk amazon sales ratings, so it has to be printed soon!)

Those of you who know me might think I'd be stressed in case I lose the hand tweaked MS. What if the house burns down tonight? (Even I'm not daft enough to worry about burglars stealing my MS.) No worries. I'm SO sorted. The corrected MS is scanned and saved on not one but two computers and a memory stick. (If you don't know me yet, you're probably beginning to by now. I used to be neurotic. Now I'm an author, I have an artistic temperament.... )

My other deadline this week was having to complete a 10 page synopsis of the next book in my series, for my agent. (I managed 9 pages written in chapters so I could leave lots of gaps.) (I hope my agent doesn't read this!)

What have I learned? Well, I've discovered that one deadline is a catalyst to action, two seem to operate like negatives and cancel each other out. Somehow, this week's been a bit of a struggle.

That's my excuse for posting late. Next week I'll post on time (Wednesday night) with an interesting and controversial post... Now I'm going to sleep with a rather large envelope under my pillow...



Leigh Russell

2 comments:

  1. I can't wait to read 'Road Closed'. I have everything I work on in multiple formats as well. (Hugs)Indigo

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  2. I'm glad I'm not the only one... good to hear from you, Indigo.

    ReplyDelete