Milkin' It

Not long ago, I advocated exercising restraint and showing patience when preparing to write a long story.  This was mostly because I've been dealing with insomnia and long strings of late nights that ultimately do no good to my health.

I still advocate the need for patience, and I'm still trying to break the late-night habit and get myself up to speed on a normal human sleep pattern, but at the same time I've been plotting like a motherfucker lately too.  As in I plotted a third of my Undead and Inhuman yesterday and the final third today!

By my reckoning, I'm about a month ahead of schedule with the book.  I like that.  Being ahead of schedule is always better that struggling to meet a deadline.  I didn't put in all this plot work because I wanted to impress myself.  Really, the fact is that I was on a roll and didn't see any reason to put off the ideas as they came to me, not when I had an abundance of time to get them down on paper.  Memorial Day was generous to me like that.

Plus, with my production schedule set up the way it is for Undead and Inhuman, different stages are rounded out in monthly segments; a month for plotting, a couple of months per draft, that sort of thing.  So by tying up those final threads in the next few days, I'll be able to move things up and race out the starting gate on the first of June rather than the first of July.

Ultimately, the reason I pushed ahead was because of the long Memorial Day weekend.  I had this great big chunk of time available to me.  And little by little, I have been waking up more and more early.  All this adds up to hours freed up that can be used to get more work done instead of racing for an hour just to get a sentence or two down on paper.

Remember, you can be the most creative sonofabitch on the block, but creativity is nothing if you can't eke out the time to be productive.