Blogging and Novel Writing – Revisited

Originally published 30/12/2018

You may recall that a couple of months ago I expressed my frustration with how much of my writing time was being gobbled up by this blog, and the detrimental effect it was having on my novel.

Well I haven’t just been sitting around since then. I’ve been making plans to redress the balance of my writing time while keeping this blog afloat, and since it’s nearly the New Year, and I know you’ve all just been dying to know what I’ve been up to, I thought I’d share some of my plans with you now.

Having carefully examined my own writing habits (both good and bad), I’ve concluded that a large part of my problem lies in how I plan and organise my blog; or to be more accurate, how I fail to plan my blog.

You see, I usually begin each new post from scratch on the Monday before it’s due to be published. Since I tend to only write for an hour or so each day (barring holidays and weekends), that gives me a maximum of about 6-8 hours a week to get my blog done, assuming I don’t do any novel writing. That’s not a lot of time if I’m struggling to come up with a topic, especially when you consider that I do also use that time to work on my novel.

Well, those days are gone now. For the last few weeks I’ve been working by planning out each topic in advance and organising it on a little planner I’ve knocked together on a spreadsheet. This means that whenever I sit down to write on Monday evening, I should be able to knock each post out far quicker since all the brainstorming will have been done in advance (this very post you’re reading now was written three weeks in advance, and at present I have topics planned right up until the end of February; that’s a drastic improvement on before).

I have also decided to make slight adjustments to my weekly word count. Previously I had always aimed to write about 1,000 words per post (depending on the kind of post I was writing). If it was significantly over this, I would edit it down and if it was significantly under par, I would write more. No more! While I am keeping the upper limit of 1,000 words, I am removing the lower limit. This means less time faffing about with word counts; I will simply say whatever I want to say in as many words as are required to say it.

‘But what if you want to say something really long-winded?’ I hear you cry.

I’m glad you asked! Up until recently I’ve only written individual posts. Each week was a brand new topic. From now on, however, I plan to write more serialised posts like what I did with non-human characters [2] [3] [4] a wee while back. I hope that by doing this, I’ll still be able to explore larger topics more fully while still maintaining a relaxed weekly word-count. It will also reduce the pressure to come up with new and interesting topics each week.

Speaking of serialised posts, I do have one other thing I’m very excited to announce for this coming year. As you will know if you frequent this website at all, I do occasionally post my own stories here. Until now, I have only posted flash fictions (in order to keep within my 1,000 word limit). Starting early on in 2019, however, I intend to publish a longer, serialised story on a regular basis. I don’t want to say too much about it just now since I’m still compiling my story bible and have only decided on a very tentative publication date for the first instalment (which I reserve the right to change for the time being) but I will say this: it will be an original superhero story.

I’m feeling quite good about all this. When I posted about my struggles with blogging and novel writing last year, I really didn’t know if it was possible to fix it without simply quitting the blog. Now I’m encouraged that with a little bit of planning, effort and time management it’s perfectly possible to have my literary cake and it.