I am always running into the conflict of life versus writing. No, they shouldn’t be mutally exclusive, but the time they both demand is often in short supply.

Take this week, for example. I am preparing to take holidays so work is extremely busy while I try to tie off loose ends. I also have a book launch coming up August 1st AND I’ve still got my normal writing (Boyscouts of the Apocalypse), editing (Mad Scientist Handbook, Jane Kane novel, GalaxyBillies) and plotting (Mik Murdoch 2).

You may have noticed, I didn’t even mention yardwork, house, podcasting and family (not in that order of importance).

It feels very overwhelming. So much so, in fact, that I have to mentally block the workload from my mind to keep going. Time slicing will only get me so far, after all.

What I have been doing is spreading the load out over the course of the day. For example, my editing activities occur (currently) when I’m on the bus and train on my way to and from work. Writing and plotting happen in a window of time after work and family gets the rest of my evening.

Not an easy thing to do. I’m sure you suffer the same trials and tribulations.

This holiday, I’m hoping to spend an hour or so before the family wakes up writing, editing and plotting. I may even spend a bit of the evening doing these things, but I’m less optimistic about that happening. Still, work being out of the equation for a while will mean relaxation (which has not yet been mentioned) might actually occur.

I’m looking forward to it.

Do you have any tricks and secrets to slicing the time? I’d love to hear them.

Tags: action pack podcast, boyscouts of the apocalypse, editing, irreverent muse, jack kane, michael plested, michel plested, Michell Plested, michelle plested, mik murdoch, mike plested, plotting, revision, writing

Just about two years ago, JR Murdock and I decided to undertake the grand adventure/experiment of collaborating on a book.

We both knew each other virtually through Twitter and through each other’s writing, but we had never really talked. So, I extended the invitation to JR and we began to discuss the pros and cons of working together on a book.

The first thing we had to nail down was what the book would actually be about. Seems like an obvious thing to know going in, don’t you think? The truth was, we knew it had to have humour in it, it had to be fantastic and that was about it. The idea of Steampunk was probably one of the first things we talked about.

So, at the end of our first conversation, we knew we wanted to write something Steampunk with humour. Over the course of a few more days we extended that to include YA and Superhero elements as well. We came up with our heros and our protagonists and the motivations and plot for each.

Now we were cooking with gas!

Except, how to move forward?

NaNoWriMo was coming up quickly and we thought we would use that as a vehicle to see how much of the book we could write in 30-days. We once again met (by the way, these meetings were all via Skype) and did a chapter by chapter outline of what the story should be including the when’s, where’s and who’s. I was to write the antagonist side and JR was writing the protagonist. When we were finished our outlining, we had a pretty good idea of who was writing what chapters and kind of how they would tie together.

So, the plan was, take our own separate pieces of the outline, go away and write like crazy on them during NaNoWriMo.

Let me pause a moment here to say, we made some very good progress during NaNoWriMo on the book (and other projects as well). When we pulled everything together we saw some obvious holes in the manuscript. We also saw a lot of little continuity errors. JR would describe something one way and I would see it a different way. He had me put a case down somewhere when my characters hadn’t picked it up yet.

Niggly little things that are taking a while to clean up.

Then, after NaNo when we were almost finished the book we had one major battle scene to write that naturally included both sets of characters, JR’s and mine. We decided to play tag, so to speak. JR would write a portion of the scene and then I would write a portion.

Two amazing things happened: (1) it went extremely quickly (even faster than previous writing had gone) and (2) the continuity errors disappeared. That experiment proved, for us at least, that having everything pre-plotted was only part of the equation. The second, and perhaps more important piece is, we also need to work very closely as we write. That will minimize/eliminate the continuity errors and perhaps move the whole book along more quickly. Consequently, the second book (and, yes, it is already plotted) will feature a different method of collaboration than most of the first.

Now we just have to get a couple of our individual project out of the way so we can get working on the next one. That and I need to finish my round of edits on the current Jack Kane novel so we can send it out to beta readers.

Good luck with your collaboration efforts.

Tags: collaboration, jack kane, Jack Kane and the Statue of Liberty, jrmurdock, michael plested, michel plested, Michell Plested, michelle plested, mike plested, nanowrimo, statue of liberty, steampunk, superhero, YA