Plumbum [Lead]

Sorry about not posting last week but things kinda got on top of me, as you’ll see from the post below. Suffice to say that seven days further on things are not really getting any easier and I’m starting to miss the sun.

Sometimes this writing lark can be a wearisome task. Although ‘writing’ is not really the task currently at hand. I’m actually in the realm of draft two, where endless hours of adjusting and finessing, gives little room for any real creative work. And yet, just when I need to squeeze into a day as much time as I possibly can, along comes the real world. It always seems the amount of work is inversely proportional to the amount of time available in which to complete it, whilst punishing the brain because of lack of sleep and poor schedule management. Yes, that is the sound of violins playing morosely in the background. It can be somewhat distracting, and for that I apologise.

So what am I complaining about this week? Well, it seems that, like usual, I’ve over stretched myself again. (So what’s new you ask yourself?) Unfortunately I’ve had to throw myself back into the day job to earn a crust (damn you, mortgage). That involves several long weeks buried in a dark room. 

But life, ever the practical joker, has served up a few curve balls. Just as I began hiding from the daylight, like any self-respecting vampire, my editor returns the manuscript for book two, Blast, for my corrections. Not a small task I may add. Who was it who said, ’Don’t worry, this is the worst your book will ever be?’ They were right. It’s going to need a lot of cleaning up. But that isn’t the end of my pain. 

At the same time as the day job kicks into high gear and editing starts in earnest, I’ve also started the process of creating the front cover design. This is actually a lot more work than you might imagine; especially when you realise that I don’t really know what I’m doing. And if that weren’t enough to get along with, I’ve been trying to create some further images from the story for promotional material. I’ve started work on images of Mucus Slime and the city of Gurdendorf. Both big undertakings, as I’m sure you can imagine, and both long overdue. But I have to ask myself, ‘How do you actually create a whole city?’

So here I sit at my desk, avoiding the work I should be doing, whilst working on things that I shouldn’t, with my eyelids feeling like they are filled with lead, literally lead. I seem to be striking out in random directions, attempting to work on everything all at once, while achieving very little. It would seem that multi-tasking is not really my thing and I’m getting strange looks from everyone in the gallery, (I work in television, if you didn’t know - or at least I did. I’ll probably get fired if I don’t do some proper work soon).

I often say that writing is the hardest enjoyable thing I do - It’s never been truer than today