Month: October 2016

A Dad and a Writer: Month 3

~ vincentdehaut ~ Leave a comment

So, as is painfully obvious from the posting hiatus, this isn’t working so well.

Don’t get me wrong, being a dad is awesome, my son is awesome, and life has been pretty good lately. But there’s just not enough time in the day to do anything anymore!

I’m not worried too much for the long term – we’ve secured a spot for the kid in the quite-awesome Quebec daycare system, so starting from next summer I’ll have entire days free for writing every week. And really, in a few months we’ll be out of the need-constant-attention phase, so I’ll be able to scrounge an hour here and there. But for now… even throwing a quick blog post together is a challenge.

… which means it’s time to adjust. Starting from now, I’m bringing my laptop to work. A thirty minute lunch break isn’t long, but it’s enough to get a few sentences out every day. And it’s really what I need – constant progress every day, so that I’m also motivated whenever I get time at home to write. Because right now, it’s hard to find that writing drive.

Hopefully, we’ll see that word count creep up soon.

 

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Wordcount: 1392

~ vincentdehaut ~ Leave a comment

Eight hundred words in three weeks? That’s… not gonna cut it for novel-writing.

Good thing those new words are in a new project, then. Specifically, I’m writing a sci-fi short story.

My reasoning is simple: I figure I should probably focus on a shorter project I can actually complete in the next few months, since there’s no way I can make meaningful progress on Book the Second while also juggling queries, my day job and a baby. I figure I can finish a first draft of the story by the end of November, then blitz the editing in time for Christmas.

As to the story itself – unlike my first novel, which is straight up commercial fiction, this is definitely more of a literary work. It’s about space colonization, and it really hits how I feel about the way space exploration is currently managed. So it’s something that I want to write both because I think it’s a good story, and because it’s something I think needs to be said.

Hopefully, it’ll get read by someone at some point, too.