Scheduled StoriesNext:None scheduled at this moment.Next Empty Day:Mon, Dec 23rd
Sadly, I am only human and that means that my creative writing process can be easily disrupted.
It’s been 12 months in a row that I have been writing more or less every day, since I began writing Suzy and Jill in the end of May 2010, and 11 months since I began publishing articles online.
Sure, there were periods of sometimes 2 or 3 weeks during which this site was running strictly out of it’s buffer, but that was usually for a short cold or overtime at my day job.
There was also the Christmas vacation, mainly caused by an end of the year rush at work during which I eventually picked up writing once more, but only feeding the buffer for January and eventually February. I emerged from my Christmas vacation with over 3 weeks of chapters written in advance, often in rather good quality because I had plenty of time to plan them, write them and revise them.
Then came the February hiatus. Over the Christmas holiday, I told a few of my real life close friends about this site and to their honor, none judged me for it’s content. None passed judgement on the subject I had decided to write. Many however, expressed regret that I didn’t choose to write on more “traditional” subject so they could share my stories with their less open-minded friends and family.
So, as I explained, I began working (and successfully finished) on a personal writing project that is PG rated. My kids could read it and would probably proud of their father’s writing. The people who read it enjoyed it and gave some notes as to how to improve it, a task I might take in the future.
But my point is, even during the 2 “vacations” from this site, I was generally writing.
Recently however, seasonal allergies have been hitting me hard. I take allergies medication daily but it doesn’t work. You see, allergies do not make my nose run or my eye itchy, at least, not while I am taking my allergy medication.
What allergies do is that they make me tired. They make it harder for me to concentrate. They make me lose my trains of thought and for a writer, that’s catastrophic. I need more sleep, so I have less time to plan and write my stories, and I work slower than usual, cutting my time once more.
This week, a series of judgement errors broke part of my computer, requiring to replace one of it’s hard disks, losing a day of work to just recover the files on it. I have 6 hard disks in my computer and the one with the problems was the one with my stories and story notes. It’s the only part I believe I have no backup of (a situation now resolved).
The repairs forced me to reboot my computer over 30 times and each time, a stuck windows update tried to install itself adding 10 minutes to the reboot.
A nightmare!
To make matters worse, once I was done, Thursday, I discovered that I did have full backups and even found the Visio document of Simon and his father’s apartment, I file I had been looking for since the first day of launching this site.
All of this meant that I never managed to schedule a single chapter in advance. All of them were written on the spot, live, and probably in low quality compared to the rest of my chapters.
I really hope that the next 4 weeks will be easier, because I hope to not have to take any days off before July 7th, the 1 year anniversary of the launch of this site.