The best laid plans...

This is the first school holiday in almost three years that we are staying home.  And I feel like a kid in a candy store!  Usually holidays are spent traveling, sight-seeing, shopping, exploring, visiting family.  One huge rush to do as much as is humanly possible in a relatively small amount of time.  What a relief to wake up knowing I don’t have to do anything or go anywhere.  I can devote my holiday to working on my new book and do some marketing of my others.

During term time I only get to work on my writing over weekends.  During the week I am just too exhausted by the time I get home, so that also means for the past couple of years marketing has been on the back-burner and a bit of an afterthought.  But this holiday, as I am not going anywhere, I can spend almost three weeks marketing and writing to my heart’s content.  Herein lies the problem.  Remember the kid in the candy store?  What should I work on first?  Decisions, decisions.  And of course I do want to slot in an exercise program as well.  Gosh this is getting hard.  Maybe I should have gone away for the holiday after all!

The holiday did get off to a poor start with a terrible head cold knocking me sideways for the first three days.  However, today I am motivated, working on character sketches for my next novel, Hush Baby, as well as thinking about this Guide to living with Dementia I want to write as well.  About seven years ago I worked nights and weekends at a Dementia Care Unit.  It was one of the saddest experiences of my life.  Intelligent, previously active people, who had regressed to diapers and baby-talk.  Very few family members ever came to visit them, I guess it was just too hard to see their loved ones like that.  The patients or clients at the unit seemed to spend their waking moments waiting.  Waiting for meals, to be dressed, for their medication, for the TV to be switched on, or just generally waiting for something, anything to happen.  My Dementia Guide is going to be called Waiting for the Angels.

C U @ 8 was released recently and is now available on Amazon as a Kindle edition and as a paperback.  Sigh, I guess I’d better start marketing.  This is the problem us Indie authors face.  Your writing time is limited, and you have to use some of it for marketing.  Very frustrating.  But hey, I have an almost three week holiday to get some of it done!  What should I start with first?  Maybe I need to make a plan…
http://www.amazon.com/C-U-8-ebook/dp/B007N60QAI/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1332756700&sr=1-1

NaNoWriMo

So I finally did it.  I bought myself a Kindle and now I am addicted to reading.  I have to wonder about the timing though, with NaNoWriMo about to start.  If you plan on writing a whole heap then there's no time for reading.
For those not in the know, NaNoWriMo happens every November, where thousands of writers all over the world attempt to write 50 000 words of a novel in 30 days.  It's a huge ask and requires motivation, dedication and a huge abundance of time.  For me the issue is time.  I don't really have the time available and am not too sure how successful I'll be this year.  I did manage the previous two years, but this year it is going to be a struggle and a challenge.  I just hope I'm up for it.
I've done the ground work, research, plot, character sketches.  But despite my preparation I don't feel as if I am in 'the zone.'  I'm not sure how to get there and am hoping that once I start doing my 1600 words a day I'll just somehow magically fall into 'the zone.'  At this late stage it's all I can hope for.  Which is why I'm trying to frantically finish the new Jonathan Kelleman book I downloaded onto my Kindle.
Just over 24 hours until I start the 50 000 words.  Wish me luck!