Happy New Writing Plan -- Cecilia Peartree

Following a temporary planning meltdown towards the end of last year, New Year’s Eve found me hard at work on my 2023 writing plan. I’ve long given up making New Year resolutions, but if you are looking for one that sometimes works, you could do worse than use an old one of mine: ‘I won't say I can’t be bothered’. I think it’s the specificity of this that makes it work, as it’s much easier to stick to not saying it than it is not to feel it.

So instead of resolutions I always make a writing plan for the year. Last year’s was oddly regimented, with a page of notes about what kind of things I would write, and then a second page listing the months of the year with a sentence or two about the project I’d be working on during each month. It was this second page that turned out to be fatally flawed, perhaps not surprisingly, so this year I’m starting with just the general outline, now with only vague ranges of months pencilled in against the writing tasks, which in any case are more or less in a random order, and skipping the detailed month by month plan altogether. I don’t think it’s possible to predict what I might feel like writing very far ahead, and I know from experience that although writing almost anything can turn into a hard slog, writing one thing when you really want to write something else is a recipe for disaster.

'Monthly schedule 2022'

 You can see from the image of my 2022 plan that although I started the year highly organised and quite clear in my mind about what I would write when, towards the middle of 2022 almost the whole thing had to be crossed out or moved to a different place on what I laughingly think of as my timetable. Incidentally, this is one reason why self-publishing suits me better than working with a publisher. Nobody else would put up with my disregard for schedules.

My 2023 plan is lovely and clear at the moment but as usual I will also be creating a plan for each month as I get to it, and that will allow for the situation to change completely as I go along.

Incidentally one benefit of having a plan that I keep updating during the year is that I can see more or less at a glance that I published five novels in 2022. Two of these had been partly written at the start of the year, though. Perhaps fortunately, I only have one half-finished novel on my computer at the moment!

If you think all this is a weird way of working, you’re not the only one. One of my oldest friends gave me the keyring pictured below for Christmas!

'I was normal three cats ago'