'Tis the season, hoot the carols, and indeed it is. I've a great pile of really super presents for my family and friends, waiting only for gift wrapping. All of my Christmas cards have been sent out and I have even received two! I've invited people for the celebration, including two extras, and all in all I should be feeling very, very smug. And I am pleased, of course. It took me many years, but I've finally overcome my hatred of Christmas, and I look forward to a relaxed, happy couple of days with my family.
That all lasts until I sit down at my desk. Everything is stalled. I had, of course, a list of things I wanted to achieve this year, and I've got most of it done, truly. It has been the first year I've really got back to work properly, since Emily died. So I wrote one book and finished another, and I've published the next in the Operation Tomcat series and two of them also as audiobooks. The final month of the year was to have been spent finishing anything that wasn't finished, and generally tidying away loose ends.
But the new book part of the project can't be finalised until I get the proof copy of the paperback. I've ordered it, and also the proof copy of another book that has the paperback edition outstanding, but wonderful Amazon say they can't be delivered until 5 FEBRUARY. So that's those two things doomed to remain undone this year.
The audiobook project has similarly stalled. I was too cheap to pay for the big fat no-holds-barred subscription to the AI voice service, so I am stopped half way through converting Book 4 in the series, as I have run out of characters until mid-month when my next month's payment kicks in. I do have the third book in the series ready to go, bnt it's out with beta listeners, and my small team of those, although they started off really keen, have apparently got bored with it and I am still waiting, six weeks or so later, for them to finish that approximately two hour listen. Not cool, people. When it's a beta anything, you're holding up my work if you suddenly goof off.
The new novel I finished is in rotdown, having a good long rest so that I can have some distance from it before starting on revisions, so that can't proceed either. In desperation I have been trying to resume work on the other half finished novel I have, although it's a huge job and certainly cannot be done in the paltry time remaining in the year. And even there I'm stalled, because I need a team of very minor characters for a space mission, and somehow my creativity has deserted me. In desperation, I turned to Brandon Sanderson's writing course, which he has updated again since I last audited it. There are two weeks of it all about character creation, so I'm hoping that will get me started. Being me, though, I was unable to watch just those without watching the whole course from the beginning. Because, you know, I might MISS something. So I am finding it very, very hard to motivate myself in the mornings. If I didn't have set working hours, I probably wouldn't manage to sit down at my desk at all.
But I DO have set working hours, and a tidy desk, and so here I am, writing my blog as a kind of warm-up. Because no one wants to hear my excuses for not working, not even me. After I post this, I'll be going on with Mr Sanderson's lectures. And hopefully, something, somewhere in there will help me to get started on writing the next section of my still untitled work in progress.
And soon, soon, it will be New Year.
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