Null & Void

That's how my weekend went.

At unexpected moments, my tooth would play up causing varying amounts of pain. When not in agony, I was on pain killing drugs which had small but strange affects on me.

Saturday is always full with cricket, but due to the drugs, I didn't perform all that well, so I allowed the drugs to wear off before Saturday night and had a few drinks instead.

Sunday I slept in for obvious reasons. Woke up a little before midday and my toothache was miraculously gone (a temporary situation as it has since come back).

Having slept half the day away, I struggled to get through my normal chores and spend time on the computer. When I did sit down, I was reminded it was the first of the month - time for updates on the AHWA market database. That took a few hours by which time my legs were killing me from sitting for too long.

Then I got distracted by Australia playing South Africa in the cricket, Manchester City playing West Ham in the EPL, and Man Utd playing Tottenham in the Carling Cup Final. One thing bled into another and I finally turned the TV off a little after 4am with no writing done for the whole weekend. At least Utd won.

I will be endeavouring to reverse that bad start to the week shortly.

I've hit a bad situation with Newlands as well. I've thought about a couple of things which have happened in recent chapters and can't rationalise their occurrence with the underlying theme. That's not good. They will either need to be altered, written out, or new and different chapters written in. This should all happen on the second draft, but now it's stuck in my head, I'm not sure about moving forward. Revisions could change everything I write from now on, and I hate double handling for no good reason.

I know that sounds strange - we write, we revise. It's part of the process and I'm fine with that, but if I make the changes now, then any changes to future chapters will only occur over the course of a normal revision. It won't be a case of rewriting a chapter I already knew needed to be changed, and then having to completely change, or rewrite, everything after it. I can change the chapter now, and then continue to write the story from that point. Does that make sense?

The big problem though, is if I do rewrite now, then I can see myself getting stuck in a loop of changing things without ever actually finishing the first draft. That would be worse than having to rewrite a few chapters.

Time for some discipline, I think. And some realisation.

Unless I do some extraordinary work over my coming leave, I'm not going to reach my deadline. It's going to shift. I just need to keep working steadily so it doesn't shift too much.

This week I need to achieve three things:

1. I need to identify the bits which don't sit well with the theme of Newland, and revise them now - and only those bits. This includes finishing off the current chapter which falls into this category.
2. I need to finish off Dreaming and get it submitted. The market for it opened yesterday and I'm not ready. It's starting to stink of PARSEC 2008 when I rushed things and ended up not submitting my best work. Very unprofessional and it won't be happening again.
3. Read. I have one story to finish looking at for a friend, I have a couple of PDF novels in my inbox and a PDF chapbook. All need to be read, and I may need to write reviews on them as well.

There's only two weeks of the cricket season left and then my weekends are pretty much free, or at least they will be pain free. The lad still plays a winter sport - football. Not that poofy kind where they wear heaps of padding and helmets, Australian Rules Football - so I'll still have a few hours out here and there to watch that.

But there won't be any training interruptions during the week, no late Saturday nights, or sleep in Sunday mornings due to pain and tiredness. Winter, I think, is my writing season.

Time to get to work...