about writing

So yesterday I downloaded Sonar, which is a pretty cool piece of manuscript tracking software. It’s very simple; it has who you sent what to and when, and keeps track of whether you got a response or not. It’s sort of for short stories, not manuscripts — there’s not really an option to say ‘Got a response, sent complete ms in’ and keep it all in one ticket, but that’s ok. It’s nifty, is the point. And now I’ve got this tidy little list of what’s been sent out to whom.

There are only four items on it.

This bugs me.

Now, of those four items, three are novels and two are complete ms requests. This is actually a pretty good return, as it were, on my efforts.

But man. Four items. It bugs me.

So I was thinking about /why/ it bugged me, and I think I’ve kind of got it. The problem is that, for example, I want to write a Jubilee script to send to Epic. Comic book scripts are only 22 pages. My tiny brain is saying, “22 pages! That’s nothing! Why haven’t you /done/ that and sent it /out/?” Same with screenplays; there are a couple I’d like to write, and those are 100, 120 pages or so. It’s a sort of daunting number, but really, I write novels, and I expect 350 or 400 page manuscripts, so 120? Not so bad.

So there goes my brain again, saying, “So what’s the HOLD UP? Get in GEAR! You’re SLACKING!”

And the hold up is that it doesn’t matter if it’s /short/; it still needs to be plotted and considered and written out. I’m working on a novel right now (yes, I am, faithful readers, even if you’re not seeing evidence of it at the moment). If I were spending 6 hours a day on writing, then maybe I could spend 4 of those hours on the novel and another couple on the comic script or the screenplay. Maybe there’d be a more impressive crush of submissions out. But I’m not, because I’ve got this day job that I have to spend 8 hours a day at.

On any /practical/ level, I’m doing quite well. I’ve written two and a half books in the last 11 months, as well as a 50 page comic submission and a whole bunch of rewrites and vignettes. But there really is this nagging voice that’s saying, “I’m not doing ENOUGH.” It’s really /frustrating/.

This afternoon’s writing angst brought to you by the letter S and the number 4.