Life and I have a complicated relationship. Throw in writing, and we have quite a love-hate triangle, constantly battling over each other's hearts and, mostly, time.
How do you balance writing with life? I usually do well enough, but this year has been a brutal tug-of-war in life's favour. Several classes are to blame, though I'm most upset about chemistry (taking it for the third time, after scoring a 5 on the AP test and getting A's every other time—needless to say, it's a hugely frustrating way to tear through time without actually learning anything). I have to kick myself into NaNoWriMo mode to get out 500 words or so of Break Out after a weary day, and I can forget about seriously pursuing other stories at the same time.
Of course, writing is very much based off life, so I'll handle whatever happens knowing I can use it somehow. Perhaps not always quite so optimistically as I just made it sound, but nonetheless handle it.
Time is really the only good weapon life tends to use against me. Crushing stress about exams—I go to writing for freedom. Death of awesome uncle—I apologized to readers if the quality was bad and kept writing, anyway. But loads of chemistry lab work and research paper outlines—there go my hopes of writing (and escape) for the next few days.
Ah, well. I'm sure this happens to everyone.
I completely know how you feel. School is the big reason I hardly ever work on my FanFiction, because when I'm home I just want to relax rather than spending hours writing. I've always been impressed by how often you managed to update, despite how busy you were. Nevertheless, I think that if you need to take more time, take more time. You update so frequently that nobody's going to complain if you cut it down to once a week or even once every two weeks. You deserve to be able to relax after working so hard so often.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry to hear about your uncle - I remember hearing about a depressing event that had affected you while writing Brutal, but I didn't know what it was.
I can relax when I'm dead. ;) I don't know—I just feel like my real trademark ability is getting the chapters out, so I really don't want to keep the readers waiting much, especially when most of them have updates for The Rules to compare.
DeleteThanks.