Feel the burn every day.
I’ve been working on a new novel (if you’ve been wondering why my recent posts have been shorter, that’s the reason). It’s my third attempt at a novel, and hopefully I’ll be happy enough with the results to seek publication. Writing 5-6 days/week is difficult, but also extremely rewarding.
So here’s my realization. It had been a couple years since I stopped working on most recent novel before this one, an alternative-biology mystery. I wrote it without an outline or ending in mind (big mistake for a mystery!), and the end result was filled with plot holes and continuity errors. It’s probably fixable, but after a couple rewrites I decided I was better off taking a short break and starting a new novel project (this time with a proper outline).
Well, that short break stretched into two-and-a-half-years. Which is about the same amount of time between my first attempt at a novel (an adventure story that tried to cram every idea I’d ever had into it; after finishing it I realized I had better just start a blog to give myself a proper firehose outlet). And I had the same stupid idea too — give myself a “short break” before starting the next project.
So I figured out why that doesn’t work.