It is time for my weekly update. So soon? What happened to the past week? Time seems to be passing much faster than it used to! I only have to look at how my morning has gone so far to find evidence of that.
I have spent the past hour working through the backlog of emails in my personal account. There are now only 15 unread messages, and they fit in the opening screen. No more having to search down through hundreds of messages looking for the start of an important conversation. I even found a 2017 newsletter from a missionary family I have promised to pray for. It sat there in the inbox opened, so the habit of marking things as important and then letting them disappear off the first page of notifications is nothing new… Welcome to my confession about procrastination.
Why was I looking at emails in what should be my dedicated Devotional Time? I have been checking for new messages at too frequent intervals for days, as I am awaiting a quote for a cover design from a local graphic artist. The five I have already received through an international referral service were alarmingly above my budget. My editor thought I could use my Fine Arts skills to design my own covers, but I had an attack of self-doubt and wanted some professional advice
from my own amateur attempts to discover what I might want
for the cover of Book 1: White Rose of Promise
Let me know what you think by leaving me a comment.
A year ago, this waiting period would have frozen me in place. Then, I was in the final stages of writing the graduating project assignments for my BA in Fine Arts and Visual Culture. The exhibition was over, and I had to write two reports: one covering the key influences from a year’s research and the other presenting the final images for the artistic work I wanted to be assessed towards my degree. The race was on but every day the designated tasks seemed to be taking so long. Procrastination became my new normal. I found out from my fellow students that this was a very common problem for them too.
Each time I sent off a request to my faithful study buddies I seemed unable to make any more progress until I received their feedback. At one stage, I realised I was spending more time looking for their responses than I was devoting to actually writing my report. I had to learn how to push myself to work on other tasks while I waited. That learning opportunity has served me well in my current ‘assignment’.
Here is a link to my Bookworms To Butterflies facebook album for the exhibition.
I took more than 139,000 and still have to make time to look at some of them (I had timed cameras set up all around the room).
So what have I been doing this week? Revising the first ten chapters of the sequel – it still feels strange working on the NEXT book while the first one is still in the preparation stage. I have added the main characters to the Series Outline so I can cross-reference their details each time they appear in the story, and I have been looking at how each one expresses themselves in their scenes. It is easy (at the moment) to remember all the central characters from both books, as they are familiar to me, but already I have too many secondary characters to juggle. I need one person to secretly be an enemy, so I went back through conversations looking for clues to that ultimate betrayal. It is also essential to start leaving clues (and add these details to the Series Outline) for future manuscripts so that my readers already have a good understanding of the new heroes’ and heroines’ motivations before those characters get to speak for themselves.
Last night was the first time I experienced confidence in my ability to generate a marked difference in tone between the new story and the first. The heroine of the first book is a devoted Christian, and everything that happens is filtered through her prayer life. But her unbelieving sister is the central character of the second book, and when this sister reaches her breaking point, there is no filter for her pain. Spending so much time describing her emotional
As I become more engaged in my fictional world, I have increased the time I spend in prayer and meditation. I don’t want to become lost and irrelevant to the real world opportunities that God has given me. Last week, someone in my family had a real accident that could have been disastrous. As a writer, I can see the different narrative possibilities that would lead me into a valley of shadows (Psalm 23:4). I am thankful God was merciful and saved my loved one from suffering a long-term disability. They are still very sore and unable to function to their maximum potential and have succumbed to a viral illness while their immune system was weakened by the pain and extra medication. Another topic to add to my prayer list.
Research fills any gaps in my spare time, as I have been subscribing to newsletters and reading as much as I can about how to become a published author. Somehow I have ended up on a couple of mailing lists that now go straight to the bin, but otherwise, my email inbox is flooding with useful information. I have had to make the hard decision to let go of some of
I have decided I WON’T be writing my own newsletter. My once a week contribution to this page, and sharing on my different facebook pages will be more than enough. If I were to add any more writing commitments to my schedule and this will be the ultimate procrastination towards getting my novels published. )