Authors Electric

 In my previous post here I reported on my new writing plan for 2023, but I must confess I've already driven a coach and horses through it. The desolate wastes of January seemed to stretch so far ahead that I couldn't restrict myself to working on only one novel at a time, but I didn't entirely expect to end the month having written 12,000 words of the novel I was halfway with as well as 15,000 of the one I didn't intend to start until February. And there's more... What I had planned to do was to spend most of January finishing the historical novel I was in the middle of, while occasionally getting out my plotting notebook to draft a plot for a new mystery novel in one of my existing series. I'm not quite sure where it all went wrong, but I think that as usual I got bored with plotting and decided I wouldn't know where the story was going until I made a start on writing it. I am already well aware that this is a high-risk strategy and often results in a lot ...

Until recently I had thought of myself as a skilled multi-tasker. However, the combined impact of the pandemic and retirement has made me think again. These days I seem to have trouble accomplishing one task at a time, never mind several. To take just one recent example, I managed to buy a new car yesterday, after months of dithering. I was quite pleased with myself for getting through all the paperwork and various real-world actions involved in this, such as emptying the old car of years' worth of stuff including the four pairs of shoes I seemed to have thought necessary for driving, but it occurred to me that in the process I had put off doing all sorts of other, unrelated things, feeling as if I couldn't possible cope with doing anything else before this one major task was complete.  While considering this, I realised I didn't know what the term multi-tasking really meant. I looked it up online to make sure what I thought of as multi-tasking was what everyone else meant ...

Modern life is complex.   Sometimes I wake up of a morning, usually a Monday, and the birds are singing in the trees. All my projects – be they writing, home or day job – are like ripe fruit ready to be picked. I’m so grateful for the opportunities that life presents. Other days I wake up with a huge weight on my chest. Each project is like a rock on a medieval torture board, squashing me flat as a suspected witch. I can’t draw breath and one more task will finish me off for good. Those days are thankfully few and are just to be got through in one piece. I can’t even reach up to remove a rock and spend the day just concentrating on breathing, knowing the next day will be better.   I’ve wondered about this phenomenon because the projects on the good days are often the same as those on the bad days. Perhaps the good days are when I have my optimistic head on me and I’m anticipating the rewards of a job well done. On the bad days I’m scared of failure. Failure is...