Tag Archives: Challenges

Finish Your Shit

I was challenged at Balticon by a good friend of mine. He’s an author and a podcaster and I greatly admire. He pulled me aside and said something along the lines of “I just want to make sure that you are finishing your shit.” He’s seen my tweets about the Write or Die word counts I’ve been achieving and he wanted to make sure that those words were going somewhere.

See, this isn’t such a bad question actually. I have something that another writer calls “biblioterminophobia” or fear of finishing a book. In my case that’s fear of finishing writing a book. I’ll get very close and then get focused on something else for far too long. This pattern will repeat itself if I’m not careful and I’ll end up with six or seven unfinished projects.

Right now I’m actively working on the following:
The Harvest (second draft)
LWF Satire (unfinished first draft)
Nancy – Unauthorized Predation (unfinished first draft)
Untitled dieselpunk story (unfinished first draft)

That’s four right there. I am committing to finishing the second draft of The Harvest and the LWF satire by the end of June. That will require me to put the brakes on the other things for a bit. It helps that I’m getting on The Magic Spreadsheet bandwagon.

I’m glad that I’m part of a community that strives to encourage writers to follow Heinlein’s Rules:
1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you write.
3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
4. You must put the work on the market.
5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.

The last two are somewhat flexible given various attitudes towards self publishing, but rule two is far harder than any of the rest, for me at least. What rule is tough for you? What are you doing to overcome that?

Picture credit Tania Pires