Have you ever gone out to a nice restaurant, looked at the menu and seen the most delectable dish that calls your name? You look at it, decide it’s too much to eat, move on and, invariably, come back to it and, somehow, despite your best intentions to behave and not overeat you order it anyway?

You have? Me too.

That’s actually what my writing and podcasting workload has felt like lately. There’s all these great things to work on, but if I try to do them all I’ll be overextending myself. I’ve got ‘Get Published’, ‘GalaxyBillies’, my YA novel rewrite, my short fiction. They all take time and I want to do them up right.

Then there’s preparing for Balticon, Con-Version, Surrey International Writer’s Conference and any other cons I hear about. They each need something different in the way of preparation.

So, where do I draw the line?

I actually don’t know if I need to draw a line. I just need to be better at time-management and take small bites from each. For example, I know I need to write about 4,000 words for each episode of ‘GalaxyBillies’. I have about eight days to do that so I need to write 500 words per day. That should take me no more than 1 hour.

Then I need to rewrite the YA novel. If I can do 250 words per day with a few extra on the weekend, I should be able to get it finished in good order. Doing that, I can still have time for sleep and family (that’s the theory, anyway).

The alternative is to let some of the projects sit for a while. But which one? I can’t let ‘Get Published’ go and I certainly can’t stop writing and podcasting ‘GalaxyBillies’. The story is getting good and I’ve made commitments to my listeners. Do I dump my short fiction? How about the YA novel rewrite? If I do either of those then I greatly reduce my chances at getting published.

Oh well, I guess I’ll just keep them all.

Unfortunately, I also have to give up a few (more) things. I’m already down to about an hour of TV per week (OK, maybe two) so there’s not much to go there. I can’t give up the little exercise I’m getting now and Family Time is sacrosanct. I will NOT give that up. They’re the reason I work in the first place.

That leaves… sleep? I don’t know if I can give even an hour of that up. That means I’ve got to get much better at time-management. Got to, got to , got to.

It’s going to be tough because I’m not a schedule kind of guy. I plan what I’m doing and keep it pretty high-level, but I never regiment myself to the point where I have things down to the hour when it will happen. Unfortunately, I think that’s what I need to do.

<right hand raised, left hand over heart> I promise to be more regimented in my writing/podcasting habits and get all my projects under control and finished. Oh yeah, and no new projects until a few of these are finished first.

Maybe one more small, bite? Nope, not even one.

Personal Update

Nothing new to report. Still writing, still podcasting. I haven’t heard anything new on my last contest entry. I am waiting to see how my auction items on The Boom Effect do. That will mean a bit more work for me, but, if the time management thing works out, won’t be too big a problem.

Tags: Galaxybillies, Get Published, irreverent muse, Michell Plested, podcast, projects, schedule, work, writing

Every new project, be it writing, podcasting, woodworking or whatever, has a teething period where everything isn’t quite perfect. That has certainly been true of all my past projects and it is proving to be true with my current writing/podcasting project.

The project I’m talking about is my new GalaxyBillies story/podcast.

To give you some history, I first came up with the rough story idea a year or so ago. I came up with the plan to write comedy MUCH farther back than that (say four or five years farther back, if not more) so this project wasn’t something I just sat down to write one day on a whim.

The first two drafts were less than… ideal, I suppose is the politically correct way to say it. Non-PC would be “they sucked major A**”. That was mostly because I hadn’t ever written comedy before and my story kept going the direction of my past works. That is to say, not funny, but serious.

I think I threw out about three drafts of the first episode. But I eventually realized my mistake and I wrote the first episode and, after some editing, I had something I was happy with. I recorded the episode, added sound and viola’, the story was ready to test.

My alpha audience liked it (you know who you are) so I bravely (foolishly?) posted the pilot episode on December 24th. My intention was to get a proper feed created for GalaxyBillies and have a second episode ready for January.

The feed is proving to be more tricky than anticipated. I ended up switching my podcasting plugin for WordPress (you will most likely notice some relics from my old podpress plugin in the posts – I’m using powerpress at the moment) and I think (operative word here) I have it working more or less the way I want it to. The graphic isn’t showing up yet and the title isn’t perfect but it is a separate feed.

I’ve even got the next episode well on its way to being written. The recording of the pilot went well enough that I’m not completely worried about it, but I’m not foolish enough to expect it to be perfect when the next recording session happens.

At this point in the story you are probably scratching your head wondering why on Earth I would put my first episode of “GalaxyBillies” out when I haven’t even written the second one yet. After all, many of podcasting’s seasoned warriors tout the wisdom of having a minimum of five episodes written, recorded and mixed before ever putting a single one out into a feed.

Well, you see dear friends, it’s like this. I am a BIG fan of Douglas Adam’s masterwork “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. I love the humor, the irreverence of it all and I especially love the organic nature of the story.

That organic nature was achieved in a very simple way: Douglas Adams was writing it as a radio play for the BBC and didn’t know from one week to the next what was going to happen.

I wanted to capture some of that feeling in my story.

I have some basic plot elements worked out. I’ve put some thought into the main characters and I have considered the setting. I have NOT prewritten the entire plot for the story so I know where it’s going and how it’s getting there.

That will be some of the fun (I hope). But it also means I’m figuring stuff out on the fly, both technically (i.e. podcast feed) and literarily.

I can’t plan everything, now can I? And it is a fun, if somewhat stressful exercise to walk the high wire without a net. I dare you to subscribe and hear how I fare.

Personal Update

Contests have been entered (a flash fiction and a YA novel contest) and the pilot episode of “GalaxyBillies” has been recorded and posted. I will be cutting a promo for GB soon as well as the next episode.

That’s enough on the plate for now, isn’t it?

Tags: douglas adams, drafts, Galaxybillies, hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, projects, wordpress, writing