Certain writing friends of mine, naming no names (AJ Walker and David Shakes) often announce they have a plan. This year I have decided to join their club and create a plan of my own – or more accurately I’ve bought a planner – and I now intend to try and create some balance in my life.
Whilst I achieved a lot in 2018, I found that quite often I would sideline my own writing efforts and allow editing and reviewing to take over – I missed a number of submission calls this way. I don’t want to feel I’ve missed out in 2019, even if I have no or little success, I want to know that at least I took the chance and tried. If you want to see the demands on my time during the week, this is actually how it breaks down if I follow THE PLAN (during term-time):
Monday 7.15 am -4 pm – day job. Evening: Horror Tree’s Trembling With Fear
Tuesday – day job. Evening HWA Writing Group.
Wednesday – day job. Horror Tree’s TWF (writing editorial)
Thursday – day job. Writing time.
Friday – day job. Writing time (or have-a-glass-of-wine-once-January’s-over-and-forget-everything time).
Saturday. Housework/Gym. Horror Tree’s TWF.
Sunday. Housework/Gym. Writing Time
Writing Time. What am I doing here? Trying to: keep up with writing group assignments, produce more short stories for submission calls, finish the novel I started in NaNoWriMo, finish gathering my flash together for publication, create a batch of drabbles for TWF.
Other stuff. Reading obviously will be most days. I have a couple of books currently to read and review and I will be dipping into HorrorAddicts review list to read some more. I have a big TBR pile and I also need to keep reading the teen/YA books in my library in order to help recommendations to students. Beta-reading once a month for a small writers’ group in the US. Pushing for an agent or publication for my novel The Five Turns of the Wheel and an earlier one, Live.
And more – The Infernal Clock. I have to give our next project a real think through. There are also blog sites and posts and podcasts I’d like to read/listen to more …
Current Work in progress: a short story for The Shadow Booth’s women only sub call which closes on 15th Jan. The clock is ticking and the date has been marked in the planner …
It all looks a lot and occasionally it can be overwhelming – discovering I was coming to Wales meant getting 2 short stories finished (luckily I had done the bulk of the work) and my Visual Verse sub done in one evening (I was very stressed on 2nd Jan), just in case the internet was dodgy over the border. I know you have until the 15th for Visual Verse but I always write mine on either the 1st or 2nd day. Other times TWF can be relatively quiet and that frees up time for reading/writing or gives me an evening off.
And don’t forget family, they are in there somewhere being tolerant …
Other plans for 2019? Not to get too stressed …
Looking forward to:
Horror Without Borders anthology, ed. Oleg Hasanov containing my flash piece, Silo. The book will be available as an ebook in English and Russian but print will only be Russian. My first time in translation!
My short story Transcending Nature, will be appearing in an Industrial Horror anthology in August and I have a longer short story, Asylum of Shadows (gothic horror) being published by Dean Drinkel’s Demain Publishing at some point this year.
I can feel this year flying by already 🙂
Stephanie Ellis 
Awesome post and plan, Steph! However, I would never relegate a glass of wine to the parentheses. 🙂
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Keeping the wine as far away as possible at the moment, so in brackets it must remain …
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