Failing to Plan (Cecilia Peartree)

These past few months have been, for me, a good example of the consequences of Failing to Plan, but as a result I now have one almost-completed novel and one half-written one, so I suppose I haven't completely wasted my time.

I didn't realise until the other day, by which time it was too late, because it was almost the end of National Novel Wiritng Month, a festival I still observe despite it now being obsolete, that I hadn't written anything in my planning notebook since my hospital stay. In a sense my life is now divided into before and after surgery, though I'm still hoping the division will somehow heal once I've healed up physically. I've now been signed off by the surgical team so I am taking that as progress, and the fact that I've opened the notebook again tends to corroborate this.

The impressive cover of my current writing notebook

My planning notebook has been an essential tool for me for some years now, although the actual notebook in use has changed from a boring exercise book purchased in Tesco's with the weekly shopping to a rather grand one somebody gave me for Christmas a while ago, with an embossed elephant cover and some of the pages shaded to look like very old manuscripts. I'm not yet quite sure about using these special pages since they will make my already dodgy handwriting even more difficult to decipher. Fortunately I haven't reached them yet. Apart from an annual plan which I make either in late December or early January, depending on how fraught December has been, I only use one page a month to write down an updated plan. Needless to say, the annual plan is subject to so many changes during the relevant year that some outside observers, if there were any, might imagine it's pointless even to write it down in the first place. However it does help me to decide which of various quite scrappy ideas to work on and when.

In the absence of a plan for August, September, October and November, I focussed first on the task of simply being able to sit at the computer and type, something I may have mentioned before in a post here. Then it made sense to try and write more of the novel I'd started during the summer. I had deliberately chosen something lightweight that I felt I could easily interrupt if necessary, so I hadn't wanted to start on the thirtieth in my main mystery series, which seemed more important, or on a sequel to my 'what if' alternate history novel, which would need further research and thought. The summer novel is the third in a series of light mysteries set in a part of Edinburgh I know very well. 

By the end of October I had got back into a routine of spending an hour or two writing in the middle of the day, though at a slower speed than usual, partly because my stamina hadn't yet built up to a reasonable level. I decided to take part in a November writing challenge, because I had written 50,000 words every November from 2006 to 2024 for NaNoWriMo and it seemed natural to try and do so again even without that particular option. One of my online writing friends, also a NaNoWriMo veteran, suggested using ProWritingAid who were running 'Novel November', to track word counts, and after some thought about whether to start the month by aiming to finish the summer book, then at 40,000+ words, I decided to abandon it temporarily and start on something new.

Two typical notebook pages

During November, I became aware that some extra tasks related to writing had fallen off my radar, and after far too much thought, I realised it was because I hadn't been recording them  as part of my monthly writing plan. These included marketing efforts, such as creating new graphics for Facebook and other social media channels, updating blogs, and signing up for promotional activities such as sales and newsletters. I think the fact that I started a shiny new project before finishing the last one is also partly down to my failure to plan, though this also  happened partly because I lost track of time and didn't realise how close it was to November!

Anyway, I hope I have learnt something from all the above. It will soon be time to write another annual plan. I always look forward to doing this as it almost feels like being able to start all over again with a clean sheet, though that isn't exactly true as there is almost always something left over from the year before.

Though of course, before I even think about that, I still have to compile a plan for Christmas shopping before it's too late...