30 Days of Fika Books: Five

End of week one!

I decided to think of this week as I might any other new job. It's been more about settling in and wrapping my head around the work ahead than getting fully stuck in. I planned it that way deliberately, as I have a bad habit of getting excited about new ideas, flinging myself in head first, and then having to be like "hold on a moment, what in the everloving heck am I actually doing here..."

I once read that Danielle Steele writes every single day no matter what. If she finishes a book at 4:30 pm, she will turn the page and start a new one for half an hour before her day's work is done. I tried to emulate that for years. Well almost -- I'm not going to pretend I wouldn't knock off for that day as soon as I typed "the End", but I certainly attempted to move on to the next one the following day.

I tore through the Dark of Night series in less than a year and moved right on to Behind Blue Eyes and Broken Mirrors, and while it was a mad, fun time and I'm proud of all of those books... there is a reason I didn't write another book for over a year! I'm always going to get excited by stories and carried away trying to write fifty-two at once, but my hope is that this newsletter is going to give me a frame work that keeps it sustainable. Part of that is factoring in things like a few days' breather between drafts. I don't necessarily need to be fully off work, but just dialling it down to let my brain recharge after the mad frenzy of (because the final week or two of a draft is ALWAYS a frenzy!)

Last week I turned in my draft of the final season of an audio series I've been writing. It was fairly intense for the last month or so, as it was a bit tricky tying up three seasons' worth of storylines, plus the story itself is quite dark. Plus there is the added complication that it is being adapted for TV right now and I'm not completely convinced that the adaptation is going to be true to what I've written. At this stage I've realised I have no choice but to let them get on with it and hope for the best, but I had the situation playing at the back of my mind while writing, so I felt extra pressure to get across everything that is important to me about the characters.

I finished the draft, sent it off to my lovely editor, and twenty minutes later started a super intense and incredible two-day Zoom workshop on my movie. The workshop was phenomenal (I will talk about it properly soon, it deserves its own post!), but it is safe to say my wee brain was fit to burst by early this week!

So it's been a week of pottering. I've started this blog, I've set up my office, I've made checklists and hitlists and schedules. I took most of Wednesday off to go on an archaeological dig, and I both made, then abandoned as ridiculous, a plan to take up running. This evening I'm going to an absolutely delicious candlelit yin yoga class followed by a soundbath.

Then I'm going to roll up my sleeves, because next week the real work begins...