By the time this post goes live, I would’ve finished the revisions for my latest manuscript, which means that it would be (God willing) one step closer to publication. This also means that I had spent more than a month revising a manuscript that, frankly, needed all the work.
But that’s not the reason why it took too long.
A lot of other things happened in the last six weeks. I was out of commission for a week because of my allergies. I had to accompany my father to the doctor’s clinic several times. At one point I even went through extreme depression, and while I’m no longer as down on myself as I was at that time, I can’t say for certainty that I’m 100% okay right now, either.
So when did I find time to write?
The short version was that I threw away my usual schedule and started revising whenever I found the time to do it–not just during the evening, but also in the afternoon (preferably with a good cup of milk tea) and sometimes even in the morning. But the truth is that I had to psych myself a whole lot to get over my misery and just get to work.
When I wasn’t working on the computer, I was taking notes by hand. I printed out a lot of my problematic scenes from my manuscript, and not just the steamy ones. I went to town on them using several colored pens before going back to Scrivener, saving the previous draft as a snapshot, and building up the new draft from my notes. I wrote new scenes, new dialogue, new insights into my characters.
And I ended up with a manuscript that was a few scenes short of meeting the 50,000-word limit for the project. Talk about determination.
I don’t know what’s going to happen to this story, or if I want to talk about it when the final decision gets handed down. What I do know is that I’m going to move on from this, and work on the next project to keep me busy. That’s the attitude that I have to keep up these days, just to keep myself sane and healthy.
Onward and forward–until the next deadline comes along.
