Keeping Busy; Getting Little Done

Time certainly flies when you’re having fun.

Or when you’re doing new things and trying to keep up with old!

I’ve been doing email writing workshops through ACFW since shortly after joining back in February 2010. I’m in my third monthly course and having a great time.

In May, I joined a crit group through ACFW and have been learning the ropes for the main group and for a smaller crit group.

All three of these interactive groups have been a great boost to my writing. The workshops, which have covered such things as characterization, hooks and, this month, subplots, have allowed me to develop the second draft of Saving Grace (now under a different title) at a pace that is much less intense than the usual development process. The feedback has been invaluable, too.

I’m sure the crit groups will prove just as helpful in helping me write better fiction as I’m writing it. That’s my hope, anyway.

There is a problem, though. I get so engrossed in writing assignments and reading and critting other people’s work that time for my own work is at a premium. I’ve gotten to the end of  more than one day this month and realized I haven’t done any serious writing of my own! I’ve written very little actual fiction and have been struggling through some of the development process, too. The blogs – this one in particular – have been suffering from neglect, too. I’m going to need to institute some serious time-management protocol or I’ll stop being a writer and start being a reader!

It doesn’t help writing to be caught in quandaries on almost everything I could be working on. I’ve decided to rewrite Perfect Opportunities to more precisely fit a genre. Currently, it has a foot squarely in the mystery genre and another foot squarely in the cozy mystery genre and yet another foot squarely in the suspense genre. You see my problem (and it’s not a three-footed manuscript). Difficulties making a decision and sticking with it have hampered progress here.

Saving Grace is also giving me fits as I attempt to figure out what to do with it has originally intended and with the second draft, which has gone off in another direction and is more about the male lead than about Grace.

Oh, well. Just like children, stories sometimes do things like that.

Little did I know that writing stories would be so much like raising kids! At least they’re not out past curfew (though they sometimes keep me up late!)