Just when I thought…

Well, it’s been a while since I last blogged, but I have my reasons. I’m knee-deep in proofs for The Hoard of Mhorrer, with about a two week turnaround, so things are hectic. Hectic enough to feel like this “break” from writing is rapidly diminishing. And it’s also become stressful at work for the first time in about 10 years. Not great. So I haven’t been blogging for a while. And probably won’t be for the next two weeks.

Not unusual, I guess. But there are reasons, like I said.

David Isaak’s post over on the Macmillan New Writer’s blog has caught me at a bad time, because I’ve been honest about my feelings and perhaps these are only temporary feelings, perhaps not. We’ll see after the next two weeks. The fact of the matter is, is that I’m drowning in responsibilities. I have too many: to my wife, to my friends, to my employers, and now Macmillan, and I suppose to this blog as well. The juggling act is getting a bit much, as more balls are thrown in, and not just squishy red ones, but barbed balls with razor wire covering their edges. I’ll get through it all, because it’s the sort of methodical person I am, but these last weeks have taught me enough to know that next year, unless I can find more time, things must change.

Firstly, this blog will almost definitely be wound up and will be used as archived material only. Secondly I’ll be looking to hand over the admin reigns of the Macmillan New Writers blog at some point next year. David is the co-admin but I’m not going to dump it all on him.
And then we’ll have to look at the writing. The writing is okay at the moment, I still enjoy it. The other side, i.e. editing, proofing, publicising etc will need to be looked at more closely. For the Hoard of Mhorrer I won’t be going forth and doing appearances in January and February as I did for The Secret War unless both books suddenly become bestsellers. I simply won’t have time for it. And the financial returns for that invested time are negligible – as someone told me recently, I’m not being “cost effective.”

And there it is. Time. The enemy of everything, it appears at the moment. It’s not, as one Jean Luc Picard said that it’s a companion through life, more that Time seems to rule everyone around you and you are therefore ruled by them. Deadlines. Deadlines. Deadlines. Next year I can hit those deadlines if I can free up more time. That means seriously looking at going part-time in the day-job which now relies on how the books sell, as a recession means any cut in wages has to be supplanted by royalties. I have too many responsibilities to do it any other way – and I’m not unique either; many published writers are under the same pressures and have been for many, many years.

So what about the future?
As I said in the MNW blog comment, I’ll still be writing for sure. Writing is like a class A drug to me. I can’t contemplate a time when I won’t be writing. But being published? Well, we’ll just have to see, but I think that make or break period is coming around the corner…