Summary:

I decided to start doing morning pages this week, and there may have been some quite startling results… Glad I didn’t have a huge amount of paid editing to do this week, as the subconscious crew went rogue!

 

Monday:

I reviewed a computer game.

 

Tuesday:

After reading an interview with Julia Cameron in this month’s Writing Magazine, I decided to give ‘morning pages’ a try, and started today – in a new notebook, bought specially for the task.

Once I got going with my actual ‘work’ for the day, I started with the paid editing, completing the next two chapters of the Vegas thriller, and drafting another article for the copy editing blog.

Then I read and made comments on the next few chapters of Hannah’s novel.

After lunch, I was hoping Revision Club would help me get started on the new Legacy draft, since I was feeling very apprehensive about it! Charlie was there, and we commiserated over not being able to find our brains, and then we knuckled down to our respective tasks.

As I could have predicted, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d feared, and I managed to complete revisions to the first two scenes, which was my planned amount for the day.

 

Wednesday:

The subconscious crew had inexplicably been writing a weird stand-up comedy routine two nights running, at around 3am, so I decided I’d better write it all down, just to get them to stop. I have absolutely no idea what prompted this, and I was pretty sure it was all terrible and would never see the light of day, but I wrote it down anyway.

I did my GYWO discussion post for the month, then the third article for the copy editing blog.

After that, I edited the next section of the Vegas thriller, which turned unexpectedly supernatural!

After lunch, I revised the next two scenes of Legacy, keeping to my ‘best’ schedule, and therefore hopefully creating more of a buffer, in case I need to slow down later on.

I also read and added comments to the penultimate section of Hannah’s novel.

 

Thursday:

After Dave read my ‘stand-up’ routine and said it was really good (though wryly amusing, rather than laugh-out-loud funny), I worked out a way to amend it to be a piece of creative nonfiction. I then sent it to a couple of the TL;DR writers for a second opinion.

 

Friday:

Back to the cafe for my second ‘proper’ working/writing day of the week.

I finished editing the current section of the Vegas thriller and sent it back to the author for review and approval. He seemed extremely happy with my work and also said I was free to continue at my own pace, which was great, because he’s was my only paying client at the moment, so it will be useful to go faster than the originally agreed schedule.

I also finished reading and commenting on Hannah’s novel and sent my report and the annotated manuscript back to her. I was a bit worried about what her reaction would be to my overall feedback, but she seemed very pleased and was keen to discuss it further.

After lunch, I revised two more scenes of Legacy, which kept me up to date with my most demanding schedule for completing it, so I felt good about that.

I also wrote a blog post about my recent experiences of preparing to revise Legacy.

 

Saturday:

The subconscious crew wrote what might have been the start of an interesting story overnight, so I made some notes on what I remembered, for future reference.

 

Sunday:

The subconscious crew went completely overboard and turned the previous night’s story into the background, history, setting, characters, inciting incident, vague plot outline and ultimate conclusion of what could very easily be my next YA fantasy novel!

I wrote a ton more notes, adding to them throughout the day, and even explained the basics of the idea to Dave on our long drive back from Cheltenham (it was a good distraction from the fact that I was driving) – and he said it had a lot of potential! We noodled around with some additional ideas and agreed to make a concerted collaborative effort on the worldbuilding at a more convenient time when I could take proper notes.

I realised I was definitely not in a position to be able to start focused work on outlining a new novel, and probably wouldn’t be for quite some time, but I was really excited by the idea and decided I might launch into it once the Legacy revisions are done, rather than revising Machine (or potentially at the same time, given generous enough deadlines…).

I also decided, if all this ridiculous subconscious crew output was the result of doing morning pages every day, I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to carry on with it, as I wouldn’t be able to keep up!