Blog versus Novel Project

Image provided by
Seth Sawyer @ https://www.flickr.com/photos/sidewalk_flying/

There isn’t much that goes on in my life these days. This is especially true if you compare it to how it was before I married for the second time. These days my life is filled with doing household chores, reading, watching TV, and, of course, writing. The only deadlines I have are the ones I impose on myself.

Before I decided to take a serious crack at writing a novel, I was writing posts for another blog I used to have five days a weeks and sometimes six. Consider yourself fortunate to not be able to read that blog (I took it down). You’d be appalled at the grammatic and spelling errors in each post. I had yet to find Grammarly and my skill with self-editing was atrocious back then.

It’s been just a month over a year since I took the plunge of trying to write a full-blown book. I’m not as far along on my journey as I’d like to be though. I would love to blame my lack of progress on the various circumstances I’ve found myself in during this past twelve months, but that would be a cop-out. This is especially true because I’ve had this writing urge in me for a long time, yet until last year, I’ve let it sit dormant rattling in my brain during the dead of night.

When I first started blogging back in 2005 (or was it early 2006?) at LiveJournal, I thought this might stop the sudden bolts of wakefulness at night when I have writing ideas. And it did work for a while.

When the wakefulness came back, I headed to sites like Associated Content (became Yahoo! Voices that is now closed) and Helium to write articles. I completely forgot about these sites when I was forced, by circumstances, to be off-line for a year. I really should go back to Helium to see if what I want to write still has a category over there.

During this past year, the tug between blogging and story writing have pulled and pushed at me almost constantly. Blogging gives me the freedom to write whatever is in my head at any given time. It’s my way of swabbing the decks of my mind, to clean off the debris. Still, the passion to get a whole story down lies within me. Being a real nag, in fact.

How am I supposed to juggle both? I thought cutting down to two posts a week would do the trick. Yet, as I work on my novel project, I find my mind slipping to the realm of the blog, trying to think of another topic to write about or to take a different angle on a subject I’ve written about before. Furthermore, when writing a post, I feel my mind trying to switch over to the story, thinking of what should come next, what I’ve forgotten in a previous scene, and the struggles of connecting scenes. What a mess!

I still think I should be able to do two posts a week. Maybe I need to make one of them just an update of what I’ve been doing with my writing during the week. That isn’t as mind-boggling as a whole new topic or a new angle on a subject. That way, maybe—just maybe—when I’m working on the novel, my mind with stay focused.