Forces of the clock

robjtriggs

Feb 3

Writing, it seems, is an endless battle with the forces of the clock. Or at least it is at the moment.

I have a part-time day job, and once upon a time that meant I had all the time I needed to create wonderful worlds of fiction. I would get up at a relatively civilised hour, break the old fast, and then write for an hour or so before I had to dash off to catch the bus to work.*

Then I had a kid and moved job (and county) and still I found time, with the occasional break for commercial editing, to create. However, I have made the catastrophic mistake not only to have another child but to allow myself to become inexplicably popular with my editees.

Thus actually getting time to do some honest-to-goodness writing and/or editing of my own work has become more and more of a challenge. Since Christmas I have had commercial editing jobs back-to-back, which is wonderful. But it has proved something of a challenge. My own writing has had to take a seat so far to the back that it can barely be seen in the rear-view mirror – though it is, like my flesh-and-blood children – constantly on my mind.

All this is an elaborate way of saying that, once again, I have done sod all of interest this week.

Photo by Valerie Lendel on Unsplash

That's not true, of course. Editing is endlessly rewarding and instructive and fascinating – great stories being deconstructed and put back together, sometimes like a machine, othertimes as a puzzle; the one I'm working on at the moment is very much the latter, as I struggle on each page, it seems, to work out what is a bug and what is a feature.

This should all go into the big melting pot that is my brain and hopefully will make me a stronger writer long-term.

But it's also frustrating. I have so much to do. My work awaits; my novels are screaming for attention. I know exactly what I have to do, but the further I edge from recency, the more chance of me losing my thread and having to start the edit of Our Kind of Bastard from scratch – for the third bloomin' time.

There are worse problems to have. I am grumbling because of my modest successes, today, rather than from my many failures, and the view's not so bad from up here.

But I'm going to have to change something. My emotional priority – as opposed to my financial priority, as original writing is unlikely to ever pay so well as editing other people's work – is my own writing. I'm still determined to make a career as a novelist.

But right now? Well I'm sneakily writing this at my day job because I'm too pushed with editorial deadlines (and sick children**) to do it at home. Don't tell my boss. And then the rest of the week will be taken up with aforementioned deadlines.

Next week. Next week I might finally get to do something of my own.