playing catchup

Holy cow!  I feel like I haven’t been blogging or writing hardly at all in the past week.  Last year, I was so enthusiastic about the writing–and I still am, it’s just that school has freaking blindsided me.  I had a 10 page history paper to write for today, and it threw off my schedule big time.

Fortunately, Thanksgiving break is almost upon us, and that means FREEDOM!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh yes, you’d better believe it!  I’ll be here in Utah for the break, probably having Thanksgiving dinner with my sisters and their husbands’ families.  In the meantime, though…FREEDOM!!!!!!!  Ah, how sweet!  I am so looking forward to it!

So, to help me catch up with the writing, here’s what I plan to do, starting tomorrow.  Every day, I’ll wake up early (I hate sleeping in anyways) and start off the day with some writing.

If I can get in just 500 words each morning, that will be awesome.  I always put off writing until the end of the day, after I’m already tired from running around juggling fifty different things at once.  By that time, I don’t want to write–I want to veg out on a computer game.  As a result, it’s been hard to keep a schedule–something I absolutely must do if I’m going to be anything more than a hobby writer.

If I start each day with writing, that will help me in a couple of ways.  Not only will I tackle the day’s wordcount before I’m too tired to do anything except rot in my unproductive disgustingness, but I’ll be thinking about the story a lot more throughout the day.  That will help me to keep the story moving.

Right now, I feel like I’m still in the first third of the story, not even halfway through with the thing.  I really, really want to finish this before the end of January–if I don’t do that, it’s going to be really difficult to have three polished novels by World Fantasy 2009.  So, that means that before the end of the month, I need to get Tristen off of the planet and into the Mormons-in-space society that I have envisioned.

Except, I really don’t have it envisioned yet–nothing concrete, anyways.  Augh!  So much to do!

So this whole break, I’m going to try and hit 4,000 words every day.  If I can’t do that, at least I can do 2,000.  And before school starts again, I want Tristen to be off of this planet and into the next section of the book.

Oh, and I’m going to blog more.  There’s so much that I want to discuss here that I just haven’t been able to post for lack of time (as well as general disorganization and disgusting unproductiveness).  So, more updates during the break.

I’m playing catchup.  Let’s hope that the vacation is awesomely productive as well as refreshingly liberating.

By Joe Vasicek

Joe Vasicek is the author of more than twenty science fiction books, including the Star Wanderers and Sons of the Starfarers series. As a young man, he studied Arabic and traveled across the Middle East and the Caucasus. He claims Utah as his home.

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