Firstly it has only been a month since my last blog post. However, I am still alive, and I wish to give my condolences to everyone who has lost a friend or family member to COVID-19. As time passes, I am starting to hear of friends and others who have survived COVID-19 and are now on the difficult road to recovery even months after surviving the disease.
A writing update, I could just as well call this a lifestyle update as I changed my routine and have over the last month settled into having my alarm clock going off at 7am. Hope goes out into the back garden, and I put her food in the bowl, then while she eats, I make my first coffee of the day. Afterwards, I make porridge, and I am sitting at the computer writing before 9am, sometimes well before 9.
What has changed, you may ask. Firstly I am sticking to this new routine, and secondly, I am not looking at any news or email until the evening. The result is a vast improvement in productivity. How sustainable this is will depend on how long I can manage with a low intake of coffee. I am trying to keep it to 2 mugs max before lunch, after a while the brain adapts, and you have to drink more coffee to get the same productivity. The other day I was at the desk until lunchtime, and by then I had 4 mugs of coffee, I was buzzing, I was on a roll, I had not had writing word counts like it since before the pandemic.
We are back into increasing numbers of Covid-19 cases, and by the way things are going at the moment we will all be back into a tougher lockdown by November if not before. Flu season is approaching so get your jab. I have been reassessing what my writing plans for winter will be. I lost so much time during the first lockdown, trying to look after my mental health. Hopefully, I am better prepared for lockdown 2 when it comes. Either way, I am back to doing rewrites of book 2 before I get it put into paperback, my plan is to get the rewrites done by mid-October.
After that, I need to do further research before I restart work on the 1st draft of book 4. The hope is to start back on the writing on the 1st of November, at the moment I have just over 49,000 words of the first draft done. Book 5 is just a skeleton at scarcely over 7,000 words of the initial draft, I have no date yet when I will get back to number 5. However, it will be when I am no longer working on book 3.
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