Sunday journal ~ push and shove

Gosh, another month has passed already… it’s been a busy one. I’m still juggling creative endeavours with paid freelance and contracting work — but as the latter gains momentum, the whole balance is becoming trickier.

Business momentum is good — yay! Displacement of writing time is not — meh…

I’m longing for a writing retreat right about now. Longing to transport myself away somewhere (the island, perhaps?) to bury myself in this revision and shove the rest of the world to one side for a while.

I’ve almost finished revising the section I’m calling ‘Act 1’, which ends with the first major turning point. I wanted to have it finished by the end of this month, but I’ve been thwarted by a troublesome new scene that is taking ages to massage into submission.

The challenge with revising, I’ve found, is inserting new scenes or modifying existing ones without sending the story off course (as far as the rest of it is concerned). There’s a domino effect when you start tinkering in the middle, and if you’re not careful you can end up faced with major story reworking.

This is all good, as long as it’s a definite improvement and will make the story stronger. But sometimes I wonder whether my changes are an improvement. Or is it just a matter of grass being greener (bright and shiny!) , and all that?

What if these changes are making things worse?

In this particular case, however, it’s a necessary new scene, so there’s no getting out of it. And it’s an important scene. So I just need to keep plugging away. Even if it does feel as though I’m picking up grains of diamond out of sand with chopsticks…

I’m still feeling the love, though, so that’s a good thing.

Time management is something I’ll need to keep working on, though. At the moment  it feels like an uphill battle to cram the creative work around the contract work… or am I trying to cram the contract work around the creative work?

It’s kind of moot. Bottom line: there’s a lot of push and shove going on, leaving me a tad frazzled and ‘Grrrr Argh’ at times. Which helps nobody, of course.

My mission for July, therefore, is to figure out the right balance and be at peace with it. And if I don’t get the balance right? Be at peace with it anyway.